144 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



distinguished bibliographer enumerates ten or twelve; but does 

 not seem to have quite finished that catalogue. As considerable 

 a number of Arabian medical botanists of a less ancient period 

 is also given. 



The best of those botanical fragments, gathered in as it were , 

 from the wreck of ages, were what really inspired the first begin- 

 nings of modern botany in the sixteenth century. From the time 

 of the establishment of universities and better schools of medicine 

 in the middle ages, the best text-books of pharmacy were those of 

 the ancients, Hippocrates, Nicander, Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, 

 and as many more less celebrated than they. The remedies in 

 use were almost wholly vegetable, as were also the poisons and their 

 antidotes ; and the old authors' books were the topics lectured on in 

 every school, and their plant descriptions were trusted to for the 

 correct identification of plants alimentary, medicinal, and poisonous. 

 And so, not even from the simplest outline of botanical history 

 may all mention of the old Greek, Roman, and Arabian agricultural, 

 horticultural, and medical botanists be omitted. We are not indeed 

 able to construct out of their literary remains a botanical history 

 of their period ; but we know that they became at last, and inci- 

 dentally, the inspirers of a new epoch which dawned upon botany 

 a thousand years or so after the last of their line was dead. Sketches 

 of the life and work of a few of them, and only such as came after 

 Theophrastus, will here find place. 



Nicander of Colophon. — This Greek grammarian and poet 

 flourished in the second century before the Christian era; was 

 native of a small village, Claros, close by Colophon in Ionia, and 

 was anciently known as the Colophonian Nicander by way of 

 distinction from others of the name of Nicander. He was of great 

 renown as a poet, and his topics were mostly such as invite to 

 the consideration of the living things of field, forest, and wilderness. 

 Evidently Nicander was a naturalist, also learned in pharmacy and 

 toxicology, and chose to express himself in poetic measure. That 

 which may have been his most elaborate work has been lost, that 

 is, the Georgica, a versified treatise of agriculture praised by 

 Cicero, 1 and extensively quoted by Athenaeus, ^ whose quotations 

 are all that remain of the poem. Among these remnants, there is 

 a long passage on flowers and other ornamental plants, an account 

 of the Egyptian nelumbo, a dissertation on poisonous fungi — the 

 earliest on record— and even another on the cultivation of edible 



' Cicero, De Oratore, Book i. 



^ Athenaeus flourished some three centuries after Nicander. 



