212 Philosophy of Botany. 



*Here we meet the ever memorable personage of Augustinus, 

 the Bishop of Hippo. He was born at Tagaste, in Africa, . 

 A.D. 354; studied philosophy at Carthage and afterwards in 

 Rome. Inclined to dissipation in his youth, he took on an ac- 

 tive change of his mind after he had become conversant with 

 the writings of Cicero. They had improved his taste and in- 

 spired him with an ardent love for wisdom. Not meeting 

 with the satisfaction he expected froni the Greek and Roman 

 writers, he applied himself to the study of the holy Scriptures. 

 While in Rome he undertook the profession of rhetoric.-' 

 From this engagement and his skeptical- turn he became in- 

 volved in irksome controversies, to evade which he moved to 

 Milan. While there, and before his return to his native land, 

 to accept the Bishopric of Hippo, he gained the friendship of 

 Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, a Christian teacher of great elo- 

 qjience and probity. In his works he shows great attach- 

 ment to the PlatonLc system, and in one chapter of the boTjk, 

 " De Civitate Dei," (The City of God), he treats natural the- 

 ology in the manner of Plato. He is inclined to think that 

 all objects, besides animals, are in some way endowed with 

 souls, and advances the idea of a possible spontaneous gener- 

 ation, as he could not otherwise explain the existence of ani- 

 mal life upon oceanic islands, far removed from the continents. 

 He proposed that from the beginning of the world two kinds 

 o'f seeds of the living beings had existed: one, the visible, 

 which the Creator had implanted in animals and plants ; that 

 each, after his own manner, should propagate itself ; the other, 

 an invisible one, which lies latent in all elements, and becomes 

 active only by particular proportions of mixture of matter and 

 degrees of temperature. This seed, lying latent in the ele- 

 ments, since primordial times, he thought would produce 

 plants and animals in great multitudes without the coopera- 

 tion of preexisting organisms. He. did not controvert the 

 privilege of explaining a natural process in an intelligible way. 

 The orthodoxy of the present day would not allow him to 

 raise such a conflict with the Mosaic narration. He is the 

 most learned, and permanently, the most influential of the an- 

 cient fathers of the church. His firm belief in the reality of 

 miracles, his definite declaration that he would prefer a mira- 



