The works of these men were studied by all the learned, during fifteen hundred years and more; they were the text-books of science during what are called the dark or middle ages, and although now out of date, they were the good seeds of knowledge, sown in difficulty, in those early days.
Aristoteles, Theophrastus, and Plinius were not only botanists, but naturalists in every sense, and the first named is especially celebrated as a student of and writer upon animals; he was a great zoologist. Theophrastus knew much about geology, and so did Plinius.
These men, then, brought the science of botany out of its childhood, and saw it partly on its way through its youth; they had removed it beyond the fanciful ideas and strange notions of the earliest writers on the subject, and had begun to classify plants, and to study the relations of plants to surrounding nature, and to the wants of man. Chemistry and the use of the microscope were unknown, and therefore progress in the necessary direction could not be made at that time of the world.
It must be remembered that botany does not consist in collecting, drying, and drawing plants alone, but it relates to everything about the vegetable kingdom of nature. The growth of the plant from the seed; how it lives, breathes, and its sap circulates; how starch, and sugar, and other products are formed—have to be considered. The manner of unfolding of the flower, the anatomy of its fruits, and of the leaves and stems and root, and the method by which the kind reproduces, and the decay of the plant have to be studied. Then the uses of plants, medicinal and as food, have to be treated. How they can be best grown, and how plants are distributed over the land at different heights, form other subjects; and the arrangement of plants in a classification founded on the similarity of their most important anatomical structures, and constituting what is termed a natural system, is one of the most necessary studies.
CHAPTER II.
THE RISE OF THE SCIENCE OF PLANTS.
John Ray—Joseph de Tournefort—Their lives.
The world went to sleep for many centuries, so far as natural history and many other things are concerned, after the time of Pliny, and sixteen hundred years elapsed before any advance was made in botanical knowledge. This was the age when the only light on the earth was struggling Christianity, and it was shaded by superstition and violence. At last men began to learn Greek again, and to read the ancient authors carefully, so that nature began to be studied. A few foreign botanists began to attempt to add to the knowledge the ancients had given them, and to classify plants.