Systematic Botany. 159 



that there are 71 plants noticed by name, which generally 

 are such only as were applicable to the purposes of man; 

 and viewed in this light, the number, as compared with those 

 known to the early heathen writers, is far from inconsiderable. 

 The Homeric Flora amounts to less than 30 species ; that of 

 Hippocrates, in the year of the world 3630, to 274 species ; 

 and of Theophrastus, who is supposed to have flourished 

 about the same time, to something less than 500 species. 

 Dioscorides, who, it is most probable, lived in the time of 

 Cleopatra, more than 300 years later than Theophrastus, 

 notices 600 plants ; and finally, Pliny, in the seventy-fourth 

 year of the Christian era, compiled, from an examination of 

 more than two thousand volumes of Greek and Roman writers, 

 an account of nearly 1000 species, the result of the investi- 

 gations of more than forty centuries. In the succeeding 

 fourteen hundred years, we have already seen that the pro- 

 gress of botany was so slow, that if an increase of 500 

 species is allowed to have taken place during that long 

 period, it is as many as can be possibly made out to have 

 been discovered. But the two next centuries, when the 

 knowledge of plants was assuming a scientific form, produced, 

 after making every allowance for repetitions and spurious 

 species, upwards of 4500 new plants, a number more than 

 three times greater than had been ascertained in all the ages 

 of the world before. 



But if we find this opinion confirmed by the experience of 

 the ages anterior to Tournefort, how much more strongly is 

 it supported by the evidence of modern times. In the first 

 edition of the Species Plantarum, published fifty-three years 

 later than the first edition of Tournefort's Institutes, the 

 number of species amounts to 7300, and so extraordinary 

 was the advance of botany under the auspices of Linnaeus, 

 that in a few years more it was found that 1500 plants could 

 be added to the list. Pulteney, indeed, makes only 7800 in 

 all ; but. in this he must be mistaken. 



The number, however, of species described by Linnaeus, 

 even in his latest work, is by no means to be taken as the 

 standard by which the actual state of knowledge at his time 

 is to be measured. It is well known that his notions respect- 

 ing species were peculiar to himself, and it must also be 

 supposed that the difficulty of adapting the half-described 

 species of his predecessors to his system, operated with him 

 in some degree in inducing him to neglect their labours, 

 in cases in which his own knowledge did not chance to be 

 such as confirmed their opinions and descriptions. For this 



