Systematic Botany. 157 



modern times had been made in botany ; the whole of this 

 author's materials having been borrowed from Aristotle, Dios- 

 corides, Isidorus Macer, Pliny, Avicenna, Platearius Actor, 

 and Cassius Felix, an obscure writer, whose works are lost. 

 But the practical ignorance of the monks was not the only evil 

 which impeded the advance of physical knowledge. They 

 were in many instances deplorably unlearned in the languages 

 from which they borrowed their opinions. With Arabic, the 

 only source to them of new ideas, they were in most instances 

 imperfectly acquainted ; and the degree of knowledge which 

 they possessed, even in the Greek language, was so low, that 

 they were led into the commission of continual errors, even in 

 translating the fables of classical writers into the dreams of 

 themselves. Another, and a more serious consequence than 

 the decline of science, was the result of this deplorable state of 

 botanical learning, which, as a modern writer has justly 

 observed, was so desperate, that it is not more surprising 

 that it should ever have arrived at such a condition than that 

 it should ever have been extricated from it. By a frequent 

 misinterpretation of the Arabic writers it not unfrequently 

 came to pass that properties were ascribed to plants which 

 were directly the reverse of those which the original authors 

 attributed to them ; a curious instance of which occurred 

 with respect to the cinnamon. This was for a long time con- 

 sidered a deadly poison, in consequence of Nicolaus My- 

 repsicus, a Greek physician who flourished in the thirteenth 

 century, having translated Dar-sini, the name given to the 

 cinnamon by the Arabians, by the word ag<re.vMov. 



The time, however, arrived, when some truly learned men 

 undertook the exposition, not only of the blunders of their 

 contemporaries, but of the ignorance of those original authors 

 in whom a blind confidence had for so many ages been re- 

 posed. The bold attack of Hermolaus Barbarus upon Pliny, 

 and of Nicolaus Leonicenus upon Serapio, and the Arabian 

 writers, the one published at the end of the fifteenth century, 

 the latter at the commencement of the sixteenth, put an end to 

 the delusion under which the world had laboured for so long; a 

 time. These men fearlessly tore the mask from before the 

 face of the impostors of their day, and boldly succeeded in 

 convincing the world that the ignorance of antiquity had been 

 mistaken for the experience of ages ; and a new impulse 

 was given to the pursuits of naturalists, not only by these 

 writers, but also by the declaration of Collenuti, an earnest 

 defender, indeed, of the originality of Pliny, that " non 

 satis esse ad herbariavi perdiscendam tradendamque, herbarios 

 scriptores legere, plantarum videre picturas, Gneca vocabida 



