10 PREFACE 



him orally in botany among other subjects, and who also wrote two 

 volumes of botany both of which passed into oblivion more than 

 two thousand years since. How much, then, of the Theophrastan 

 botany is that author's own? What of its principles are his only 

 as having been imparted to him by his great friend and tutor 

 Aristotle? What passages of the work are but compiled from writ- 

 ings of a more remote antiquity, with which Theophrastus may 

 have been familiar, of which even the authors' names have perished ? 

 Questions like these serve but to admonish one of this, that the 

 earliest beginnings of the science do not admit of discovery. 

 The same is in a measure true of comparatively recent periods. 

 The annals of our science, as gathered in hitherto, reveal no more 

 thrilling epoch than that of the sixteenth century. Some of the 

 best known authors of that period, Brunfels, Tragus, Fuchsius, stud- 

 ied, besides the not so very many printed books about plants that 

 were then extant, numbers of old mediaeval manuscripts from 

 which they brought forth and quoted many a botanical idea^ 

 several of them well advanced beyond the ideas of the ancients as 

 we know them. No annalist of a later age seems to have had time 

 or disposition to ascertain how much of the assumed new and 

 original botany of those German fathers — so they style them — was 

 taken out of old mediaeval manuscripts which, although they may 

 still be extant, later historians have neither consulted nor troubled 

 themselves to enquire after. 



Contemporarily with those German herbalists there flourished in 

 Italy a learned professor, first at the University of Padua, then at 

 Bologna, afterwards at Pisa, whom people regarded as the one 

 peerless botanist of the time. His university lectures were received 

 as oracular, and students came to him from almost everywhere 

 in Europe; yet Professor Luca Ghini published nothing. His 

 supremacy as botanist of the first half of the sixteenth century is 

 attested by tradition only. In the very next generation after him, 

 several of the chief luminaries of the science were men whom he had 

 trained, and to one of them, Cesalpino, there is now everywhere- 

 accorded the praise of having created the epoch of modern botany. 

 To what extent is Cesalpino's great work, De Plantis, a product 

 of the mind of Ghini? The question is one that forces itself upon us 

 and is perhaps the more interesting because hopeless of ever being 

 answered. 



Such are a few examples of what the annalist who would be just 

 and truthful will often find himself in need of knowing, yet can never 

 ascertain ; and they intimate but too pointedly the impossibility of 



