General review of the subjects discussed in the foregoing chapters brings home to us several results of some interest. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the incalculable debt which Botany owes to Medicine. An overwhelming majority of the herbalists were physicians, who were led to the study of botany on account of its connection with the arts of healing. As we have already pointed out, medicine gave the original impulse, not only to Systematic Botany, but also to the study of the Anatomy of Plants.
However, as the evolution of the herbal proceeded, we have shown that botany rose from being a mere hand-maid of medicine to a position of comparative independence. This is well exemplified in the history of plant classification. When the early medical botanists attempted any arrangement of their material, it was on a purely utilitarian basis; the herbs were merely classified according to the qualities which made them of value to man. But as the science grew, the need of a more systematic classification began to make itself felt, and in some of the works published in the latter half of the period we are considering, there is a distinct, if only partially successful, attempt to group the plants according to the affinities which they present when considered in themselves, and not in relation to man. The ideal of a natural system in the Vegetable Kingdom, in which each plant should find its inevitable place, must have been clear for instance to de l’Obel, when he wrote in the ‘Adversaria,’ of “an order, than which nothing more beautiful exists in the heavens, or in the mind of a wise man[44].”
Second only to the debt of botany to medicine is its debt to certain branches of the fine arts, more especially wood-engraving. The draughtsman and engraver not only disseminated the knowledge of plants, but their work must often have revealed to the botanist features which had escaped his less highly educated and subtle eye.
As we have already pointed out, the art of plant description lagged conspicuously behind that of plant illustration. The vague and crude, but often picturesque, accounts, given by the early herbalists of the plants which they observed, contrast curiously with the technically accurate, but colourless and impersonal descriptions from the pens of modern botanists.
The rapid rise of botany, in the two centuries which we have reviewed, must have been greatly stimulated by the cosmopolitanism of the savants of the renaissance. Periods of study at a succession of different universities, and wide European travel, including visits to scientific men of various countries, seem to have formed part of the recognised equipment of the botanical student. Possibly the zeal for travel was not altogether spontaneous, but was artificially stimulated by the religious disturbances so common at the period of the Reformation and later, which often drove into exile the adherents of the Reformed Faith, among whom many botanists were numbered. This is exemplified in the cases of William Turner, Charles de l’Écluse, and the Bauhins.
It is interesting to notice that, in the works of the best herbalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such for instance as Bock, Turner, Dodoens and Gaspard Bauhin, we find, comparatively speaking, little belief in any kind of superstition connected with plants, such as the doctrine of signatures, or astrology. A number of books dealing with such topics appeared during the period we have considered, but their writers form a class apart, and must not be confused with the herbalists proper, whose attitude was, on the whole, marked by a healthy scepticism which was in advance of their time. It would, naturally, be far from true to say that they were all quite free from superstition, but, considering the intellectual atmosphere of the period, their enlightenment was quite remarkable.
Text-fig. 112. Wood-cut from the title-page of the Grete Herball, 1526. Reduced.