INTRODUCTION 5 



for by Diogenes Laertlus, an uncritical writer, who 

 flourished some five hundred years after the death of 

 Theophrastus, and Diogenes speaks of a garden, not 

 of a botanic garden.^* 



If Greel^ liberty and civilisation could have endured, 

 Greek philosophy and science would no doubt have 

 overcome many of their early difficulties, among which 

 we must reckon an undue propensity to argument. 

 But a long course of crushing misfortunes arrested 

 their progress. Alexandria now became the great 

 centre of learning and science, and here a Greek and 

 Semitic school of much celebrity laboured to extend 

 the knowledge of geometry, astronomy, optics and 

 geography. Human anatomy also was diligently and 

 profitably studied in Alexandria under Herophilus, 

 Erasistratus and their successors, but after Aristotle 

 and Theophrastus no great progress was made in 

 natural histqry until science of every kind died out. 

 The most important treatises which have come down 

 to us from the Eoman empire are the Materia Medica 

 of Dioscorides and the Natural History of Pliny. 



Dioscorides recorded what was known of the occur- 

 rence, form, colour and properties of medicinal plants ; 

 he paid great attention to the names of the plants ; 

 his classification is utilitarian, being mainly founded 

 upon the useful products which the plants yield. Now 

 and then, however, a succession of plants belonging to 

 the same family (Labiates, Umbellifers, Composites, 

 Borages, or Leguminosse) shows that real affinities had 

 been perceived and made use of Close resemblance 

 in leaf and stem did not conceal from him the funda- 

 mental unlikeness of the stinging nettle and the dead- 

 nettle, which some botanists of a much later age brought 



1 Meyer, Gesch. der Botanik, Vol. I, p. 152. 



