CRATEVAS’ FRAGMENTS 121 
belief in the possession by that plant of a power (which man _ has 
sought in all ages) to control the sex of offspring. Dioscorides 
expressly adds ‘‘Cratevas narrates this; but to me such things 
seem to pertain to folk-lore,’’ * and then in succeeding chapters 
De Orchide, De Serapiade, etc., Dioscorides continues to cite the 
same imagined efficacy without taking pains anew to exculpate 
himself from personal endorsement of its value. Such was his 
practice; one general disclaimer sufficed. 
Comment on Cratevas’ medical uses for the Aster is given, supra, 
pp. 45, 50. Credulous indeed Cratevas doubtless was, like the ° 
world in which he lived; but we deeply regret the loss of his 
writings, steeped in credulity though they were, for the fragments 
that remain are little windows through which we peep into the 
hidden undercurrent of plant-lore which swept on through that 
ancient world—in the days when even common plants were in- 
vested with marvel, before a later superficial wisdom had pro- 
nounced them weeds and ignored them as of no account. 
Dioscorides and Pliny quoted independently from Cratevas ; 
other quotations occur in Galen, and in the scholiasts to Dioscori- 
des, Nicander and Theocritus.¢ In 1561 Anguillara in his 
Semplici made quotations * from a Greek MS. containing frag- 
ments of Cratevas; what this MS. was is not known; and An- 
guillara’s Semplici is itself very rare; it contains 37 quotations 
from Cratevas; but Wellmann,{ the latest writer on Cratevas, 
thinks they add little to the quotations already familar in Dios- 
corides. We hear also of an unedited fragment of Cratevas, of 
four quarto pages only, in the Imperial Library at Vienna, of 
which Tournefort wrote as far back as 1700, that only those could 
judge of Cratevas to whom it was permitted to inspect this, and 
on which Meyer said in 1854 that we must suspend judgment till 
it is studied by some one who is. both philologist and_ botanist. 
Hoefer in 1856 also mentions a ‘‘ Lexique Reranique ‘3 §.of Cra- 
ns 
Diosc, 3, 30, ‘* Haec memoriae 5 prodidit Cratevas ; ae autem vider talis 
ad traditionem prosequi.”’ 
T Quotations are wre ale Meyer’s Geschichte der Botanik, 1: 252-254. 
{ Wellmann, Maximilian ; ‘* Krateuas,’’ in Kon Lowenage dad, W: — Git- 
tingen, —Abhandlung, philol. hist. Klasse, N. F., Berlin, 1897; pp 3 
4F. Hoefer, article ‘¢ Cratevas’’ in Biographie papnnat ee (Didot, Darin he be- 
ing an ios extract from his “ Histoire de la Botanique’’ then unedited. 
at 
