IV 
PREFACE. 
fible, to determine what are the plants intended by 
their defcriptions. 
In the middle ages, botany Iliared the fate of 
every other kind of literature. But while the fci- 
ences were gradually declining in Europe, fome of 
them flourifhed under the patronage of the Arabian 
caliphs, whofe power was at its greateft height in 
the ninth century ; about which time Serapio, Avi- 
cenna, Averrhoes, and other learned Arabs, wrote 
on botany but with no great fuccefs. An author 
known by the name of Plato Apuleius, or Apoli- 
enfis, of whofe herbarium very old manufci ipt copies 
are prcferved in fome curious libraries, is fuppofed 
to have lived near this period. 
In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth cen- 
turies, fome obfcure writers on botany appeared in 
feveral parts of Europe; as Arnoldus de Villa nova, 
Platearius, Matthasus Sylvaticus, and Bartholomew 
Clanvil, commonly called Bartholomseus Anglus, 
a Francifcan monk, defcended of the family of 
the earls of Suffolk, who lived in the reign of king 
Edward the third, and wrote a book of natural 
hiftory entitled de proprietatibus rerum\ which w^as 
tranflated into Englifh by John de Trevifa in 
the year i 398. The writers of the middle times 
preferved botany from total* oblivion, rather than 
made any improvement in it, 
At the time of the revival of learning in the 
fifteenth century, fome were employed in reftoring 
and explaining the works of the ancient botanifts. 
Eatin tranflations were made of the Greek authors, 
Theodore Gaza, one of thofeTearned Greeks who 
fled into Italy after the taking of Conftantinople by 
the Turks, was the tranflator of Theophraflus. 
Three verfions of Diofeorides, with commentaries, 
appeared; the firfl by Hermolaus Barbarus, patri- 
arch of Aquileja; the next by Marcellus Virgil, fe- 
cretary to the Hate of Florence; the laft and moft 
efteemed by John Ruel, a French phyfician. 
In 
