94. 
Botanists and their Work . 
S.A. NAT., VOL. XV. 
June 12th, 1934. 
shell, by which 20 or 30 men could be killed or disabled in an. 
instant, and which was so superior to the old cannon ball which 
could only knock off one head at a time. 
Some of the herbalists were also botanists, but their main 
interest was in plants which provided vegetable drugs. The 
first scientific botanist was unquestionably Theophrastus, who 
lived in the golden age of Greece and was a pupil of Plato and 
Aristotle. That was about 300 B.C. He is said to have reached 
a great age; some accounts give him over 100 years, and his 
final complaint was about the shortness of human existence, his 
opinion being that it ended when a real insight into its problems 
was just beginning. If he did not invent the saying, “Art is 
long, life is short”, he might well have done so. We are chiefly 
interested in two of his many works—“The History of Plants”" 
and “The Causes of Plants.” He inherited a garden near Athens 
from his master Aristotle, and there he grew and studied plants. 
His simple and accurate descriptions of those which he knew can 
still be admired by modern botanists. He distinguished plants, 
just as we do to-day, as woody or herbaceous, and the herbac¬ 
eous forms he classified as annual, biennial and perennial. Sepals 
and petals he regarded as modified leaves. Stamens he called 
“capillaries”, no doubt from the hair-like filaments on which 
the anthers are usually mounted, and he recognised that the 
fiowerheads of Composite plants consist of many separate flowers, 
hie applied the word “fruit” to any vessel containing the seeds 
and he coined the word “pericarp” for the wall enclosing the 
fruit—all exactly as we do to-day. If he had possessed only a 
pocket magnifying glass, he would probably have discovered 
many things which were not known for long ages afterwards. 
The very modern branch of plant ecology was not unknown to 
him, for he describes the association of plants in woods, marshes, 
rivers, etc. He devotes a whole book to different timbers known 
in Greece. He had the scientist’s dislike of allowing fancies 
to take the place of facts. He stigmatised as fabulous one super¬ 
stition of his day—that wheat can be grown from barley seed, or 
vice versa. As Dr. Harvey Gibson says in his “Outline of the 
History of Botany,”—“there was not another pure botanist after 
Theophrastus for 18 centuries.” 
After that we have a succession of physicians who wrote on 
drugs and described some of the plants from which they wer# 
derived. Dioscorides and Galen, who came several centuries 
after Theophrastus, belong to this class, and when the Roman 
Empire collapsed and Europe entered upon that dark and dismal 
