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From the days of Theophrastus to those of Pliny, 

 during an interval of nearly four hundred years, 

 there had been only enumerated about six hundred 

 plants, regarded more for their medicinal than nou- 

 ishing qualities, and the account we have of them is 

 very indistinct and unsatisfactory. — Following came 

 on the darker ages, in which the few known arts 

 of life shared the sad fate of civil liberty, leaving 

 to the world the discovery, by a few Moorish and 

 Arabian physicians, of one or two herbs — such as 

 Rhubarb and Senna, which are now recognized in 

 our materia medica. 



The Roman Era, deriving as it did, its taste for 

 gardening from Greece, to the extent it had gone 

 there, opened a wider field to its cultivation. Nu- 

 merous beautiful passages in the Latin poets prove 

 the high estimation in which gardening was held 

 among the Romans. — Tacitus describes a palace built 

 by Nero, which was on a site laid out on the princi- 

 ples of modern gardening ; he says, ^the usual and 

 common luxuries of gold and jewels which adorned 

 this palace were not so much to be admired as 

 the fields, and lakes, and flowers, which here and 

 there opened in prospects before it. But it is to 

 modern times we must look for the revival and 

 creation of botany as a science. — Goesner, Haller, 

 and Linnaeus established for it a system of investi- 

 gation, by which thousands of new and rare pro- 



