_. Introduction. 4 ate G3: 
often have been again lost, until at length an acquaintance 
with medicinal plants became a speciality of the priests, and 
the healing art founded upon it a part of religion. 
The father of medicine, as he has been termed, Hippo- 
crates, who lived in the fifth century before Christ, extended 
the observations that had hitherto been made ; and we know 
that he enumerated upwards of 200 species which were at © 
that time used in medicine. Butit was not till the following 
century that a really scientific work on botany appeared, 
written by the celebrated tutor of Alexander the Great, Aris- 
totle. His work is unfortunately lost ; but his ideas have 
come to us in the writings of his pupil Theophrastus, who 
described 400 or 500 different plants in their relation to 
agriculture, domestic economy, and medicine. At his death 
the new structure fell to pieces, or at all events we. do not 
find that any further progress was made with it. This was 
the state of things until, in the first century after Christ, 
'  Dioscorides wrote a treatise on medicine, in which over 600 
medicinal plants were described, though often briefly and in- 
sufficiently, and the elder Pliny collected what was most 
noteworthy from the writings of his predecessors. The posi- 
tion in which botany stood at that time may be understood 
from the naive statement of Pliny that there were, it is true, 
more plants in the hedges, fields, and roadsides than those 
he had described, but they had no names, and were of no 
use. The works of Pliny and Dioscorides remained the best 
on the subject till the sixteenth century, and enjoyed the 
highest reputation. At that time German investigators 
arose who aroused the study of plants from its long rest, and 
earned therefrom the honourable title of the fathers of 
botany. The first of these was Otto Brunfels of Mayence 
(0b. 1534); other German scholars followed closely upon 
him, Bock (0d. 1554), Fuchs (0d. 1566), and Gessner (0, 
1565); as well as some belonging to other countries, Ma- 
thiol (0d. 1577), Dodoneeus (0d. 1585), Lobelius (0. 1616), — 
and Clusius (06. 1609). But no one of these made any 
' B2 
