He would ope his leathern scrip,
And show me simples of a thousand names,
Telling their strange and vigorous faculties.
Milton, Comus.
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 Saracens[28] 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.
[28] Sprengel, i. 230.
[29] Ib. i. 239.
[30] Ib. i. 241.
[31] Ib. ib.
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, three[32] 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.
[32] Augsburg, 1488. Mainz, 1491. Lubec, 1492.
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.