INTRODUCTION. 
Ill 
B. C. In his " Historia Plantarum," he described all the 
plants which were known in his day, but without pursuing any 
order in the arrangement, and often applying the same name 
to plants extremely different. The physiology of plants, 
appears to have attracted the particular attention of this 
philosopher ; the physiology of trees was tolerably well un- 
derstood by him, and he distinguished between the structure 
of the trunks of palms and other trees, or in modern terms, 
between Monocotyledones and Dicotyledones. He discovered 
that nutrition was conveyed to plants by the leaves, but he 
attributed this power alike to both surfaces : the sexes of 
plants he likewise seemed to have some confused notion of. 
Of the Roman Botanists, the first author whose writings 
are still considered of value, is Dioscorides, who hved under 
Nero, but his descriptions are very imperfect, and in many 
instances, he only gives the names of the plants. His cata- 
logue however, of the plants of Greece and Italy, was the 
most complete which had been compiled at that time. To 
Dioscorides succeeded Pliny and Galen ; the latter of whom, 
confined himself exclusively to Medical Botany. It would be 
equally tedious and unnecessary to enumerate all the botanical 
pretenders Avho existed in the middle ages, and although, after 
the revival of learning, several eminent names stand recorded 
in the history of botanical science, and from whose labours 
and researches, writers of a later period have derived con- 
siderable assistance, there are few of them whose works would 
now be of any value to the mere student. It will, therefore, be 
sufficient to mention the names of Bock, Clusius, and Cffisal- 
pinus, whose writings when they can be procured, are among 
the most valuable in the science ; John Bauhin and his brother, 
natives of Lyons, whose labours were truly herculean ; Boer- 
haave and Tournefort. 
But whatever fame these later writers might have hoped to 
gain, was entirely eclipsed by the gigantic genius of the great 
Linnaeus, who, if we may be allowed the expression, rescued 
the material world from a second chaos, and laid the founda- 
tion for, if he did not actually establish, that beautiful system 
of scientific classification in which the animal, vegetable, and 
mineral kingdoms are now arranged. Before his time, it might 
be truly said that, natural history, as a science, was without 
