52 
HISTORY OF BOTANY. 
about 2500 different authors. This, in some measure, proves that the 
Romans were not without naturalists, though their fame had perished 
with their works. Pliny was too soon wrested from the lap of the 
science which he cultivated with so much zeal and success, for he fell 
a viclim to his curiosity on Mount Vesuvius, in the 56th year of his 
age, and the 79th after the birth of Christ. 
These w T ere the most eminent and most celebrated botanists of anti- 
quity. The pains they took, the colleflions and discoveries by which ^ 
they first opened the career of this science, however meritorious, could 
not but be considered as the efforts of beginners. No study was less 
susceptible of being brought by them to, a certain criterion of perfec- 
tion than that of botany and natural history in general. Rowe was not 
built in a day ; nor could the edifice of this science be raised in so 
sudden a manner. It required materials from all countries on earth,, 
which demanded to be minutely viewed, examined, and arranged. The 
Romans were the masters of the ancient world ; but they had only a. 
slight and superficial knowledge of the smallest part of it ; in propor- 
tion to the Greeks they had but few connexions with foreigners; every 
body was uncultivated but themselves; the art of printing, and that of 
engraving on copper and wood, had not yet been invented; — all these 
were material obstacles to a successful and marked progress in natural 
history. 
The plants which were known and discovered by the ancients, though 
they amounted to fome thousands, were still but very few, and an 
almost imperceptible part of an infinite whole. They solely consisted 
of the plain colleflions of southern produce, mostly gathered on the 
frontiers of two parts of the world, Europe and Asia. The number of 
all 
