I shall not here dwell further upon this subject, but proceed to trace rapidly the progress of Systematic Botany, as the classificatory science is usually denominated, when it is requisite to distinguish between that and Physiological Botany. My own imperfect acquaintance with this study admonishes me not to venture into its details, further than my purpose absolutely requires. I trust that, by taking my views principally from writers who are generally allowed to possess the best insight into the science, I may be able to draw the larger features of its history with tolerable correctness; and if I succeed in this, I shall attain an object of great importance in my general scheme. 358

CHAPTER I.

Imaginary Knowledge of Plants.

THE apprehension of such differences and resemblances as those by which we group together and discriminate the various kinds of plants and animals, and the appropriation of words to mark and convey the resulting notions, must be presupposed, as essential to the very beginning of human knowledge. In whatever manner we imagine man to be placed on the earth by his Creator, these processes must be conceived to be, as our Scriptures represent them, contemporaneous with the first exertion of reason, and the first use of speech. If we were to indulge ourselves in framing a hypothetical account of the origin of language, we should probably assume as the first-formed words, those which depend on the visible likeness or unlikeness of objects; and should arrange as of subsequent formation, those terms which imply, in the mind, acts of wider combination and higher abstraction. At any rate, it is certain that the names of the kinds of vegetables and animals are very abundant even in the most uncivilized stages of man’s career. Thus we are informed1 that the inhabitants of New Zealand have a distinct name of every tree and plant in their island, of which there are six or seven hundred or more different kinds. In the accounts of the rudest tribes, in the earliest legends, poetry, and literature of nations, pines and oaks, roses and violets, the olive and the vine, and the thousand other productions of the earth, have a place, and are spoken of in a manner which assumes, that in such kinds of natural objects, permanent and infallible distinctions had been observed and universally recognized.

For a long period, it was not suspected that any ambiguity or confusion could arise from the use of such terms; and when such inconveniences did occur, (as even in early times they did,) men were far from divining that the proper remedy was the construction of a science of classification. The loose and insecure terms of the language of common life retained their place in botany, long after their 359 defects were severely felt: for instance, the vague and unscientific distinction of vegetables into trees, shrubs, and herbs, kept its ground till the time of Linnæus.

While it was thus imagined that the identification of a plant, by means of its name, might properly be trusted to the common uncultured faculties of the mind, and to what we may call the instinct of language, all the attention and study which were bestowed on such objects, were naturally employed in learning and thinking upon such circumstances respecting them as were supplied by any of the common channels through which knowledge and opinion flow into men’s minds.

The reader need hardly be reminded that in the earlier periods of man’s mental culture, he acquires those opinions on which he loves to dwell, not by the exercise of observation subordinate to reason; but, far more, by his fancy and his emotions, his love of the marvellous, his hopes and fears. It cannot surprise us, therefore, that the earliest lore concerning plants which we discover in the records of the past, consists of mythological legends, marvellous relations, and extraordinary medicinal qualities. To the lively fancy of the Greeks, the Narcissus, which bends its head over the stream, was originally a youth who in such an attitude became enamored of his own beauty: the hyacinth,2 on whose petals the notes of grief were traced (a i, a i), recorded the sorrow of Apollo for the death of his favorite Hyacinthus: the beautiful lotus of India,3 which floats with its splendid flower on the surface of the water, is the chosen seat of the goddess Lackshmi, the daughter of Ocean.4 In Egypt, too,5 Osiris swam on a lotus-leaf and Harpocrates was cradled in one. The lotus-eaters of Homer lost immediately their love of home. Every one knows how easy it would be to accumulate such tales of wonder or religion.

Those who attended to the effects of plants, might discover in them some medicinal properties, and might easily imagine more; and when the love of the marvellous was added to the hope of health, it is easy to believe that men would be very credulous. We need not dwell upon the examples of this. In Pliny’s Introduction to that book of his 360 Natural History which treats of the medicinal virtues of plants, he says,6 “Antiquity was so much struck with the properties of herbs, that it affirmed things incredible. Xanthus, the historian, says, that a man killed by a dragon, will be restored to life by an herb which he calls balin; and that Thylo, when killed by a dragon, was recovered by the same plant. Democritus asserted, and Theophrastus believed, that there was an herb, at the touch of which, the wedge which the woodman had driven into a tree would leap out again. Though we cannot credit these stories, most persons believe that almost anything might be effected by means of herbs, if their virtues were fully known.” How far from a reasonable estimate of the reality of such virtues were the persons who entertained this belief we may judge from the many superstitious observances which they associated with the gathering and using of medicinal plants. Theophrastus speaks of these;7 “The drug-sellers and the rhizotomists (root-cutters) tell us,” he says, “some things which may be true, but other things which are merely solemn quackery;8 thus they direct us to gather some plants, standing from the wind, and with our bodies anointed; some by night, some by day, some before the sun falls on them. So far there may be something in their rules. But others are too fantastical and far fetched. It is, perhaps, not absurd to use a prayer in plucking a plant; but they go further than this. We are to draw a sword three times round the mandragora, and to cut it looking to the west: again, to dance round it, and to use obscene language, as they say those who sow cumin should utter blasphemies. Again, we are to draw a line round the black hellebore, standing to the east and praying; and to avoid an eagle either on the right or on the left; for, say they, ‘if an eagle be near, the cutter will die in a year.’”

This extract may serve to show the extent to which these imaginations were prevalent, and the manner in which they were looked upon by Theophrastus, our first great botanical author. And we may now consider that we have given sufficient attention to these fables and superstitions, which have no place in the history of the progress of real knowledge, except to show the strange chaos of wild fancies and legends out of which it had to emerge. We proceed to trace the history of the knowledge of plants. 361

CHAPTER II.

Unsystematic Knowledge of Plants.

A STEP was made towards the formation of the Science of Plants, although undoubtedly a slight one, as soon as men began to collect information concerning them and their properties, from a love and reverence for knowledge, independent of the passion for the marvellous and the impulse of practical utility. This step was very early made. The “wisdom” of Solomon, and the admiration which was bestowed upon it, prove, even at that period, such a working of the speculative faculty: and we are told, that among other evidences of his being “wiser than all men,” “he spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.”9 The father of history, Herodotus, shows us that a taste for natural history had, in his time, found a place in the minds of the Greeks. In speaking of the luxuriant vegetation of the Babylonian plain,10 he is so far from desiring to astonish merely, that he says, “the blades of wheat and barley are full four fingers wide; but as to the size of the trees which grow from millet and sesame, though I could mention it, I will not; knowing well that those who have not been in that country will hardly believe what I have said already.” He then proceeds to describe some remarkable circumstances respecting the fertilization of the date-palms in Assyria.

This curious and active spirit of the Greeks led rapidly, as we have seen in other instances, to attempts at collecting and systematizing knowledge on almost every subject: and in this, as in almost every other department, Aristotle may be fixed upon, as the representative of the highest stage of knowledge and system which they ever attained. The vegetable kingdom, like every other province of nature, was one of the fields of the labors of this universal philosopher. But though his other works on natural history have come down to us, and are a most valuable monument of the state of such knowledge in his time, his Treatise on Plants is lost. The book De Plantis 362 which appears with his name, is an imposture of the middle ages, full of errors and absurdities.11

His disciple, friend, and successor, Theophrastus of Eresos, is, as we have said already, the first great writer on botany whose works we possess; and, as may be said in most cases of the first great writer, he offers to us a richer store of genuine knowledge and good sense than all his successors. But we find in him that the Greeks of his time, who aspired, as we have said, to collect and systematize a body of information on every subject, failed in one half of their object, as far as related to the vegetable world. Their attempts at a systematic distribution of plants were altogether futile. Although Aristotle’s divisions of the animal kingdom are, even at this day, looked upon with admiration by the best naturalists, the arrangements and comparisons of plants which were contrived by Theophrastus and his successors, have not left the slightest trace in the modern form of the science; and, therefore, according to our plan, are of no importance in our history. And thus we can treat all the miscellaneous information concerning vegetables which was accumulated by the whole of this school of writers, in no other way than as something antecedent to the first progress towards systematic knowledge.

The information thus collected by the unsystematic writers is of various kinds; and relates to the economical and medicinal uses of plants, their habits, mode of cultivation, and many other circumstances: it frequently includes some description; but this is always extremely imperfect, because the essential conditions of description had not been discovered. Of works composed of materials so heterogeneous, it can be of little use to produce specimens; but I may quote a few words from Theophrastus, which may serve to connect him with the future history of the science, as bearing upon one of the many problems respecting the identification of ancient and modern plants. It has been made a question whether the following description does not refer to the potato.12 He is speaking of the differences of roots: “Some roots,” he says, “are still different from those which have been described; as that of the arachidna13 plant: for this bears fruit underground as well as above: the fleshy part sends one thick root deep into the ground, but the others, which bear the fruit, are more slender 363 and higher up, and ramified. It loves a sandy soil, and has no leaf whatever.”

The books of Aristotle and Theophrastus soon took the place of the Book of Nature in the attention of the degenerate philosophers who succeeded them. A story is told by Strabo14 concerning the fate of the works of these great naturalists. In the case of the wars and changes which occurred among the successors of Alexander, the heirs of Theophrastus tried to secure to themselves his books, and those of his master, by burying them in the ground. There the manuscripts suffered much from damp and worms; till Apollonicon, a book-collector of those days, purchased them, and attempted, in his own way, to supply what time had obliterated. When Sylla marched the Roman troops into Athens, he took possession of the library of Apollonicon; and the works which it contained were soon circulated among the learned of Rome and Alexandria, who were thus enabled to Aristotelize15 on botany as on other subjects.

The library collected by the Attalic kings of Pergamus, and the Alexandrian Museum, founded and supported by the Ptolemies of Egypt, rather fostered the commentatorial spirit than promoted the increase of any real knowledge of nature. The Romans, in this as in other subjects, were practical, not speculative. They had, in the times of their national vigor, several writers on agriculture, who were highly esteemed; but no author, till we come to Pliny, who dwells on the mere knowledge of plants. And even in Pliny, it is easy to perceive that we have before us a writer who extracted his information principally from books. This remarkable man,16 in the middle of a public and active life, of campaigns and voyages, contrived to accumulate, by reading and study, an extraordinary store of knowledge of all kinds. So unwilling was he to have his reading and note-making interrupted, that, even before day-break in winter, and from his litter as he travelled, he was wont to dictate to his amanuensis, who was obliged to preserve his hand from the numbness which the cold occasioned, by the use of gloves.17

It has been ingeniously observed, that we may find traces in the botanical part of his Natural History, of the errors which this hurried and broken habit of study produced; and that he appears frequently to have had books read to him and to have heard them amiss.18 Thus, 364 among several other instances, Theophrastus having said that the plane-tree is in Italy rare,19 Pliny, misled by the similarity of the Greek word (spanian, rare), says that the tree occurs in Italy and Spain.20 His work has, with great propriety, been called the Encyclopædia of Antiquity; and, in truth, there are few portions of the learning of the times to which it does not refer. Of the thirty-seven Books of which it consists, no less than sixteen (from the twelfth to the twenty-seventh) relate to plants. The information which is collected in these books, is of the most miscellaneous kind; and the author admits, with little distinction, truth and error, useful knowledge and absurd fables. The declamatory style, and the comprehensive and lofty tone of thought which we have already spoken of as characteristic of the Roman writers, are peculiarly observable in him. The manner of his death is well known: it was occasioned by the eruption of Vesuvius, a.d. 79, to which, in his curiosity, he ventured so near as to be suffocated.

Pliny’s work acquired an almost unlimited authority, as one of the standards of botanical knowledge, in the middle ages; but even more than his, that of his contemporary, Pedanius Dioscorides, of Anazarbus in Cilicia. This work, written in Greek, is held by the best judges21 to offer no evidence that the author observed for himself. Yet he says expressly in his Preface, that his love of natural history, and his military life, have led him into many countries, in which he has had opportunity to become acquainted with the nature of herbs and trees.22 He speaks of six hundred plants, but often indicates only their names and properties, giving no description by which they can be identified. The main cause of his great reputation in subsequent times was, that he says much of the medicinal virtues of vegetables.

We come now to the ages of darkness and lethargy, when the habit of original thought seems to die away, as the talent of original observation had done before. Commentators and mystics succeed to the philosophical naturalists of better times. And though a new race, altogether distinct in blood and character from the Greek, appropriates to itself the stores of Grecian learning, this movement does not, as might be expected, break the chains of literary slavery. The Arabs 365 bring, to the cultivation of the science of the Greeks, their own oriental habit of submission, their oriental love of wonder; and thus, while they swell the herd of commentators and mystics, they produce no philosopher.

Yet the Arabs discharged an important function in the history of human knowledge,23 by preserving, and transmitting to more enlightened times, the intellectual treasures of antiquity. The unhappy dissensions which took place in the Christian church had scattered these treasures over the East, at a period much antecedent to the rise of the Saracen power. In the fifth century, the adherents of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, were declared heretical by the Council of Ephesus (a.d. 431), and driven into exile. In this manner, many of the most learned and ingenious men of the Christian world were removed to the Euphrates, where they formed the Chaldean church, erected the celebrated Nestorian school of Edessa, and gave rise to many offsets from this in various regions. Already, in the fifth century, Hibas, Cumas, and Probus, translated the writings of Aristotle into Syriac. But the learned Nestorians paid an especial attention to the art of medicine, and were the most zealous students of the works of the Greek physicians. At Djondisabor, in Khusistan, they became an ostensible medical school, who distributed academical honors as the result of public disputations. The califs of Bagdad heard of the fame and the wisdom of the doctors of Djondisabor, summoned some of them to Bagdad, and took measures for the foundation of a school of learning in that city. The value of the skill, the learning, and the virtues of the Nestorians, was so strongly felt, that they were allowed by the Mohammedans the free exercise of the Christian religion, and intrusted with the conduct of the studies of those of the Moslemin, whose education was most cared for. The affinity of the Syriac and Arabic languages made the task of instruction more easy. The Nestorians translated the works of the ancients out of the former into the latter language: hence there are still found Arabic manuscripts of Dioscorides, with Syriac words in the margin. Pliny and Aristotle likewise assumed an Arabic dress; and were, as well as Dioscorides, the foundation of instruction in all the Arabian academies; of which a great number were established throughout the Saracen empire, from Bokhara in the remotest east, to Marocco and Cordova in the west. After some time, the Mohammedans themselves began to translate and 366 extract from their Syriac sources; and at length to write works of their own. And thus arose vast libraries, such as that of Cordova, which contained 250,000 volumes.

The Nestorians are stated24 to have first established among the Arabs those collections of medicinal substances (Apothecæ), from which our term Apothecary is taken; and to have written books (Dispensatoria) containing systematic instructions for the employment of these medicaments; a word which long continued to be implied in the same sense, and which we also retain, though in a modified application (Dispensary).

The directors of these collections were supposed to be intimately acquainted with plants; and yet, in truth, the knowledge of plants owed but little to them; for the Arabic Dioscorides was the source and standard of their knowledge. The flourishing commerce of the Arabians, their numerous and distant journeys, made them, no doubt, practically acquainted with the productions of lands unknown to the Greeks and Romans. Their Nestorian teachers had established Christianity even as far as China and Malabar; and their travellers mention25 the camphor of Sumatra, the aloe-wood of Socotra near Java, the tea of China. But they never learned the art of converting their practical into speculative knowledge. They treat of plants only in so far as their use in medicine is concerned,26 and followed Dioscorides in the description, and even in the order of the plants, except when they arrange them according to the Arabic alphabet. With little clearness of view, they often mistake what they read:27 thus when Dioscorides says that ligusticon grows on the Apennine, a mountain not far from the Alps; Avicenna, misled by a resemblance of the Arabic letters, quotes him as saying that the plant grows on Akabis, a mountain near Egypt.

It is of little use to enumerate such writers. One of the most noted of them was Mesuë, physician of the Calif of Kahirah. His work, which was translated into Latin at a later period, was entitled, On Simple Medicines; a title which was common to many medical treatises, from the time of Galen in the second century. Indeed, of this opposition of simple and compound medicines, we still have traces in our language: 367

Where the subject of our history is so entirely at a stand, it is unprofitable to dwell on a list of names. The Arabians, small as their science was, were able to instruct the Christians. Their writings were translated by learned Europeans, for instance Michael Scot, and Constantine of Africa, a Carthaginian who had lived forty years among the Saracens28 and who died a.d. 1087. Among his works, is a Treatise, De Gradibus, which contains the Arabian medicinal lore. In the thirteenth century occur Encyclopædias, as that of Albertus Magnus, and of Vincent of Beauvais; but these contain no natural history except traditions and fables. Even the ancient writers were altogether perverted and disfigured. The Dioscorides of the middle ages varied materially from ours.29 Monks, merchants, and adventurers travelled far, but knowledge was little increased. Simon of Genoa,30 a writer on plants in the fourteenth century, boasts that he perambulated the East in order to collect plants. “Yet in his Clavis Sanationis,” says a modern botanical writer,31 “we discover no trace of an acquaintance with nature. He merely compares the Greek, Arabic, and Latin names of plants, and gives their medicinal effect after his predecessors:”—so little true is it, that the use of the senses alone necessarily leads to real knowledge.

Though the growing activity of thought in Europe, and the revived acquaintance with the authors of Greece in their genuine form, were gradually dispelling the intellectual clouds of the middle ages, yet during the fifteenth century, botany makes no approach to a scientific form. The greater part of the literature of this subject consisted of Herbals, all of which were formed on the same plan, and appeared under titles such as Hortus, or Ortus Sanitatis. There are, for example, three32 such German Herbals, with woodcuts, which date about 1490. But an important peculiarity in these works is that they contain some indigenous species placed side by side with the old ones. In 1516, The Grete Herbal was published in England, also with woodcuts. It contains an account of more than four hundred vegetables, and their 368 products; of which one hundred and fifty are English, and are no way distinguished from the exotics by the mode in which they are inserted in the work.

We shall see, in the next chapter, that when the intellect of Europe began really to apply itself to the observation of nature, the progress towards genuine science soon began to be visible, in this as in other subjects; but before this tendency could operate freely, the history of botany was destined to show, in another instance, how much more grateful to man, even when roused to intelligence and activity, is the study of tradition than the study of nature. When the scholars of Europe had become acquainted with the genuine works of the ancients in the original languages, the pleasure and admiration which they felt, led them to the most zealous endeavors to illustrate and apply what they read. They fell into the error of supposing that the plants described by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, must be those which grew in their own fields. And thus Ruellius,33 a French physician, who only travelled in the environs of Paris and Picardy, imagined that he found there the plants of Italy and Greece. The originators of genuine botany in Germany, Brunfels and Tragus (Bock), committed the same mistake; and hence arose the misapplication of classical names to many genera. The labors of many other learned men took the same direction, of treating the ancient writers as if they alone were the sources of knowledge and truth.

But the philosophical spirit of Europe was already too vigorous to allow this superstitious erudition to exercise a lasting sway. Leonicenus, who taught at Ferrara till he was almost a hundred years old, and died in 1524,34 disputed, with great freedom, the authority of the Arabian writers, and even of Pliny. He saw, and showed by many examples, how little Pliny himself knew of nature, and how many errors he had made or transmitted. The same independence of thought with regard to other ancient writers, was manifested by other scholars. Yet the power of ancient authority melted away but gradually. Thus Antonius Brassavola, who established on the banks of the Po the first botanical garden of modern times, published in 1536, his Examen omnium Simplicium Medicamentorum; and, as Cuvier says,35 though he studied plants in nature, his book (written in the 369 Platonic form of dialogue), has still the character of a commentary on the ancients.

The Germans appear to have been the first to liberate themselves from this thraldom, and to publish works founded mainly on actual observation. The first of the botanists who had this great merit is Otho Brunfels of Mentz, whose work, Herbarum Vivæ Icones, appeared in 1530. It consists of two volumes in folio, with wood-cuts; and in 1532, a German edition was published. The plants which it contains are given without any arrangement, and thus he belongs to the period of unsystematic knowledge. Yet the progress towards the formation of a system manifested itself so immediately in the series of German botanists to which he belongs, that we might with almost equal propriety transfer him to the history of that progress; to which we now proceed.

CHAPTER III.

Formation of a System of Arrangement of Plants.

Sect. 1.—Prelude to the Epoch of Cæsalpinus.

THE arrangement of plants in the earliest works was either arbitrary, or according to their use, or some other extraneous circumstance, as in Pliny. This and the division of vegetables by Dioscorides into aromatic, alimentary, medicinal, vinous, is, as will be easily seen, a merely casual distribution. The Arabian writers, and those of the middle ages, showed still more clearly their insensibility to the nature of system, by adopting an alphabetical arrangement; which was employed also in the Herbals of the sixteenth century. Brunfels, as we have said, adopted no principle of order; nor did his successor, Fuchs. Yet the latter writer urged his countrymen to put aside their Arabian and barbarous Latin doctors, and to observe the vegetable kingdom for themselves; and he himself set the example of doing this, examined plants with zeal and accuracy, and made above fifteen hundred drawings of them.36

370 The difficulty of representing plants in any useful way by means of drawings, is greater, perhaps, than it at first appears. So long as no distinction was made of the importance of different organs of the plant, a picture representing merely the obvious general appearance and larger parts, was of comparatively small value. Hence we are not to wonder at the slighting manner in which Pliny speaks of such records. “Those who gave such pictures of plants,” he says, “Crateuas, Dionysius, Metrodorus, have shown nothing clearly, except the difficulty of their undertaking. A picture may be mistaken, and is changed and disfigured by copyists; and, without these imperfections, it is not enough to represent the plant in one state, since it has four different aspects in the four seasons of the year.”

The diffusion of the habit of exact drawing, especially among the countrymen of Albert Durer and Lucas Cranach, and the invention of wood-cuts and copper-plates, remedied some of these defects. Moreover, the conviction gradually arose in men’s minds that the structure of the flower and the fruit are the most important circumstances in fixing the identity of the plant. Theophrastus speaks with precision of the organs which he describes, but these are principally the leaves, roots, and stems. Fuchs uses the term apices for the anthers, and gluma for the blossom of grasses, thus showing that he had noticed these parts as generally present.

In the next writer whom we have to mention, we find some traces of a perception of the real resemblances of plants beginning to appear. It is impossible to explain the progress of such views without assuming in the reader some acquaintance with plants; but a very few words may suffice to convey the requisite notions. Even in plants which most commonly come in our way, we may perceive instances of the resemblances of which we speak. Thus, Mint, Marjoram, Basil, Sage, Lavender, Thyme, Dead-nettle, and many other plants, have a tubular flower, of which the mouth is divided into two lips; hence they are formed into a family, and termed Labiatæ. Again, the Stock, the Wall-flower, the Mustard, the Cress, the Lady-smock, the Shepherd’s purse, have, among other similarities, their blossoms with four petals arranged crosswise; these are all of the order Cruciferæ. Other flowers, apparently more complex, still resemble each other, as Daisy. Marigold, Aster, and Chamomile; these belong to the order Compositæ. And though the members of each such family may differ widely in their larger parts, their stems and leaves, the close study of nature leads the botanist irresistibly to consider their resemblances as 371 occupying a far more important place than their differences. It is the general establishment of this conviction and its consequences which we have now to follow.

The first writer in whom we find the traces of an arrangement depending upon these natural resemblances, is Hieronymus Tragus, (Jerom Bock,) a laborious German botanist, who, in 1551, published a herbal. In this work, several of the species included in those natural families to which we have alluded,37 as for instance the Labiatæ, the Cruciferæ, the Compositæ, are for the most part brought together; and thus, although with many mistakes as to such connexions, a new principle of order is introduced into the subject.