[33] De Natura Stirpium, 1536.
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.
[34] Sprengel, i. 252.
[35] Hist. des Sc. Nat. partie ii. 169.
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]
[36] His Historia Stirpium was published at Basil in 1542.