2 
The history of BOTANY. 
their qualities, the few Plants they have named were known among the 
pcafants of their country; or that difeafes had been cured by Herbs be- 
fore the fabled Chiron ; or his days whom we fee deified under the name 
of ^scuLAPius: before the Hebrew Solomon, or Syrach. What 
the Chaldeans taught to docile ^Egypt, they learned from Some more 
early nation ; and Greece, which borrowed the Egyptian learning, owed 
the firft rudiments of knowledge to that un-named people who were their 
teachers. The volumes of Pythagoras on Plants were of avowed Egyp- 
tian origin ; and thofe of that Democritus they celebrate, were but other 
Ereams from the fame fource. In the mean time, while Learning la- 
boured in the trodden path, the Savage taught himfelf : and Greece and 
RoxMe, the feats of fcience and of power, found, like their younger fifler 
Britain, improvements even in their remotefi: conquefls. 
Thus, at all times, and every where, there mull have been a know- 
ledge of the Forms and Ufes of fome Plants : but this yet was not Botany. 
Greece gave the firfl outlines of a philofophic diftinftion; and that not 
in her earliell periods ; for though Hippocrates wrote ufefully upon their 
Virtues, and the Scarce known Crat^evas told their Forms, the Father 
of the fcience was Theophrastus. He the firfl of mankind, fo far as 
hiflory informs us, confidered Vegetables in their Origin and Strudlure, 
their Principle of Life, and various Growth, and firuck out from the 
chaos a Philofophy of Plants. 
Botany had thus its firfl Eflablifliment in ancient Greece, four hun- 
dred years before the Chrillian irra : and it was there confidered as a 
fcience ; a fingular and very noble part of natural philofophy. Such it 
began, and fuch it ended, among that celebrated people. Inflead of thofe 
advances and improvements which ought to have been expedted under 
the Roman government, it drooped, and funk into a trivial art; con- 
verfant in names alone, and the flight charadlers marked on exterior forms. 
The Arabians were the next who cultivated it; and they imperfedlly ; 
’twas lofl in the twelfth century, amongfl; the general wreck of letters ; 
and reviving toward the end of the fifteenth, with the restoration of 
LEARNING, grcw again, in the sixteenth, into a fcience, in the north- 
ern Europe. 
We are to trace its Hiflory thio’ this extent of time; which its various 
conditions naturally divide into thofe fix Periods. 
PERIOD 
