LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 53 



ground that he was not engaged upon a general history of botany, 

 but only dealing with the short period intervening between the 

 years 1530 and i860 of our era. However, that Sachs had no 

 acquaintance with Theophrastus, or even of Dioscorides, is proven 

 by this, that he credits his sixteenth-century German compatriots 

 with having gone straight to nature and described plants originally, 

 whereas the truth is, that nearly all the plant descriptions occurring 

 in Brunfels and Fuchs, are almost word for word translations of ' 

 the ancient paragraphs of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and others; 

 sometimes with a few words of th^ir own added, as often with 

 none. And as .regards that exact and intimate knowledge of 

 plants which comes of the careful study of them alive and growing, \ 

 it is safe to say that all which Sachs' sixteenth-century German 

 fathers knew combined, would have amounted to but a fractional 

 part of Theophrastus' knowledge, and that much of their own 

 observing had been suggested to them in their reading of his books. 

 An abstract of Theophrastus' work should enable the unbiased 

 and impartial to judge for themselves whether scientific botany 

 had its beginning with those good German herbalists of the six- 

 teenth century, or with an immortal Athenian or two who had 

 lived, studied plants long and carefully, lectured to thousands of 

 students, and written down the substance of their botanical lec- 

 tures seventeen centuries earlier than they. 



Life. Mitylene, a large and rich island in the ^gean Sea close 

 "by the coast of Asia Minor, was famous millenniums ago as having 

 given birth to many an illustrious personage. Arion and Terpan- 

 der, ancient masters of the art of music, Alcaeus and Sappho, un- 

 rivalled among lyric poets, as learned critics gather from the 

 fragments of their masterpieces that remain — ^these names but 

 head the list of celebrities that had been born on that island in 

 the earlier half of the thousand years next preceding the beginning 

 of the Christian era. How very famous this island was for the ex- 

 cellent quality of its products, material, artistic, and intellectual, is 

 shown in the fact that Greeks and Romans of a somewhat later 

 period, wishing to bestow the highest praise on anything, whether it 

 were a piece of music, a verse of poetry, or a cask of wine, were 

 accustomed to pronounce it Lesbian— that is, fit to have come 

 from Lesbos, the name by which the modern Mitylene was known 

 anciently. Such are a few of the available hints of the environ- 

 ment in which the protobotanist was born in the year B.C. 370. 

 His birthplace was Eresos, the most important town of the island, 

 whence he has been styled Eresius— the Eresian, perhaps to dis- 



