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HiJSTOllY Oi' BOTANY. 



patetic School. But he seems to have undertaken few jour- 

 neys and travels, since he always appeals to the testimony of 

 the diggers of roots, the cutters of wood, and the inhabitants 

 of the mountains. But, as he lived between the years 371 

 and 286 before Christ, the ever-memorable march of Alex- 

 ander the Great through Asia and Africa, afforded him an 

 opportunity of becoming acquainted with many foreign plants. 

 Although he notices these but occasionally, and without of- 

 fering any exact descriptions of them, yet his works, under 

 the title of A History of Plants, and On the Causes of Plants, 

 are immortal memorials of his ceaseless attention to the vege- 

 table world, and of his excellent observation of the pheno- 

 mena which it presents. But we must not expect from him 

 either a scientific arrangement of objects, or a systematical 

 enumeration of the plants known to him ; but we must view 

 the whole as the production of a philosopher, who, almost 

 without predecessors, endeavoured, for the first time, to em- 

 ploy the reasoning faculty upon the phenomena of the vege- 

 table world. The best edition of his works is that by 

 Schneider, and was published, in four octavo volumes, at 

 Leipsig, in 1818. Theophrastus was also the first who kept 

 a garden for plants, and in his legacy he named some of his 

 scholars as keepers of this property. 



But he found none of his scholars worthy of being a successor 

 to himself. Notwithstanding the foundation, during his time, 

 by the liberality of the Ptolemies in Alexandria, of the most 

 celebrated school of antiquity ; and, although, from rivalry 

 with the kings of Pergamus, the libraries in Alexandria 

 were raised to the rank of the best in the world ; yet the very 

 liberality of the Egyptian kings produced, by means of the 

 superfluity of literary helps, such a learned indolence, and 

 such a predilection for dialectic and grammatical investiga- 

 tions, that the study, as well as the science of nature, were 

 entirely neglected. Nay, the Pharmacopolae were again se- 

 parated from the learned physicians and teachers of that 



