4 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



opmental stages through which the botanic garden has 

 passed. 



It would be quite beside my purpose to refer even in 

 brief to the botanical writings of the Ancients. The 

 names of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Dioscorides are 

 perhaps those most familiarly associated with the early 

 history of Botany, although the classical scholar is not 

 unacquainted with the contributions to knowledge of 

 plant lore of such writers as Empedocles, Anaxagoras, 

 Apollodorus, Democritus and the numerous writers on 

 agricultural topics down to the times of Yergil and Pliny. 

 A gap of several centuries follows destitute of a single 

 botanical publication of note until we reach the 14th and 

 15th centuries when we meet with the records left us by 

 the early herbalists. Even at the best a herbal of that 

 time was little more than a catalogue of plants used in 

 pharmacy — a list of simplicia from which the first dispen- 

 sers compounded their drugs. Indeed as Sachs puts it 

 " the chief object of the earlier herbalists was to rediscover 

 the plants employed in medicine by the physicians of 

 antiquity, and, if possible, to identify in the west the 

 plants mentioned as of medicinal value by the Greeks." 



The later herbalists aimed at something higher. They 

 rightly relinquished the study of classic texts for the study 

 of nature, and contented themselves with recording as 

 accurately as possible the external configuration of the 

 plants growing in or near the districts in which they 

 resided. It is true again that their labours resulted in a 

 series of descriptive and illustrated catalogues with little 

 or no pretence at systematic arrangement of subject 

 matter. They confined themselves to diagnosing and 

 illustrating individual form and to enumerating real or 

 supposed medicinal virtues. 



From a knowledge of the history of science in general 





