Agnes Robertson Arber

“ And thus it is a special delight to see this tree in the night time, adorned on all sides with its lovely flowers, since they give forth a delicious perfume, the like of which is not to be met with in any other plant, but no sooner does one touch the plant with one’s hand than its sweet scent vanishes away. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Aristotelian Botany.
Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, concerned himself with the whole field of science, and his influence, especially during the Middle Ages, had a most profound effect on European thought. The greater part of his botanical writings, which belong to the fourth century before Christ, are unfortunately lost, but, from such fragments as remain, it is clear that his interest in plants was of an abstract nature. He held that all living bodies, those of plants as well as of animals, are organs of the soul, through which they exist. ”

“ The best epoch in the history of the herbal, from the point of view of book-illustration, is confined within much narrower limits than the two centuries we have been considering. The suggestion has been made, and seems thoroughly justified, that the finest period should be reckoned as falling between 1530 and 1614, that is, between the wood-cuts of Hans Weiditz in Brunfels’ ‘Herbarum vivæ eicones,’ and the copper-plates of Crispian de Passe in the ‘Hortus Floridus.’ This good period thus lasted less than one hundred years, and belongs chiefly to the sixteenth century. ”

“ I considered further how that in everything which arises, grows, lives or soars in the four elements named, be it metal, stone, herb or animal, the four natures of the elements, heat, cold, moistness and dryness are mingled. It is also to be noted that the four natures in question are also mixed and blended in the human body in a measure and temperament suitable to the life and nature of man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Albertus Magnus, who kept alive in the Middle Ages the spirit of Aristotelian botany, was more advanced than Theophrastus in his method of classification. It is true that he divides the vegetable world into Trees, Shrubs, Undershrubs, Bushes, Herbs and Fungi, but at the same time he points out that this is an arbitrary scheme, since these groups cannot always be distinguished from one another, and also because the same plant may belong to different classes at different periods of its life. ”

“ N the art of botanical illustration, evolution was by no means a simple and straightforward process. We do not find, in Europe, a steady advance from early illustrations of poor quality to later ones of a finer character. On the contrary, among the earliest extant drawings, of a definitely botanical intention, we meet with wonderfully good figures, free from such features as would be now generally regarded as archaic. The famous Vienna manuscript of Dioscorides (see pp. 8 and 85) is a remarkable example of the excellence of some of the very early work. ”

“ In 1526, Dürer carried out a beautiful series of plant drawings, among the most famous of which are those of the Columbine, and the Greater Celandine. The former is reproduced on a small scale in Plate XVII; it is scarcely possible to imagine a more perfect “habit drawing” of a plant.
In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci’s exquisite studies of plants, of which Plate XVIII is an example, must also have pointed the way to a better era of herbal illustration. In his work, the artistic interest predominates over the botanical to a greater extent than is the case with Dürer’s drawings. ”

“ In spite of his professional activity, Fuchs found time to produce a botanical masterpiece, which appeared in 59-601542 from the press of Isingrin of Basle, under the title ‘De historia stirpium.’ This was a Latin herbal dealing with about four hundred native German, and one hundred foreign plants, and was followed in the succeeding year by a German edition, called the ‘New Kreüterbůch.’ Of all the botanists of the Renaissance, Fuchs is perhaps the one who deserves most to be held in honour. ”

“ The drawing and painting of flowers is sometimes dismissed almost contemptuously, as though it were a humble art in which an inferior artist, incapable of the more exacting work of drawing “from the life,” might be able to excel. The falsity of this view is shown by the fact that the greatest of flower painters have generally been men who also did admirable figure work. ”

“ When we leave the early Aristotelian botanists, and turn to those who studied the subject primarily from the medical point of view, we find a great falling off in the power of description. The accounts of the plants in the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, for example, are so brief and meagre that only those with the most marked characteristics can be identified with certainty.
The Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, the earliest work to which the term “herbal” is generally applied, scarcely makes any attempt at describing the plants to which it refers. ”

“ But there is no reason why I should dilate at greater length upon the pleasantness and delight of acquiring knowledge of plants, since there is no one who does not know that there is nothing in this life pleasanter and more delightful than to wander over woods, mountains, plains, garlanded and adorned with flowerlets and plants of various sorts, and most elegant to boot, and to gaze intently upon them. ”

“ This idea is one which constantly recurs in the herbals. In 1664 Robert Turner wrote, “For what Climate soever is subject to any particular Disease, in the same Place there grows a Cure.” There is ample evidence of the survival of this theory even in the nineteenth century; for instance, in the preface to Thomas Green’s ‘Universal Herbal’ of 1816 we find the remark, “Nature has, in this country, as well as in all others, provided, in the herbs of its own growth, the remedies for the several diseases to which it is most subject.” ”

“ After this period, botany rapidly became more scientific; the discovery of the function of the stamens, which was first announced in 1682, marking a very definite step in advance. As time went on, the herbal, with its characteristic mixture of medical and botanical lore, gave way before the exclusively medical pharmacopœia on the one hand, and the exclusively botanical flora on the other. As the use of home-made remedies declined, and the chemist’s shop took the place of the housewife’s herb-garden and still-room, the practical value of the herbal diminished almost to vanishing point. ”

“ In his ‘Pemptades’ of 1583, Dodoens gave a glossary of botanical terms. His definitions suffer, however, from vagueness, and are not calculated greatly to advance the accurate description of plants. As an example we may take his account of the flower, which may be translated as follows:—
“The flower (ἄνθος) we call the joy of trees and plants. It is the hope of fruits to come, for every growing thing, according to its nature, produces offspring and fruit after the flower. But flowers have their own special parts.” ”

“ Two years later appeared the ‘Hortus Eystettensis,’ by Basil Besler, an apothecary of Nuremberg. It is a large work with enormous illustrations, mostly of mediocre quality. In the succeeding year, 1614, a book was published which has been described, probably with justice, as containing some of the best copper-plate figures of plants ever produced. This was the ‘Hortus Floridus’ of Crispian de Passe, a member of a famous family of engravers. Like Parkinson’s ‘Paradisus Terrestris,’ into which some of the figures are copied, it is more of the nature of a garden book than a herbal. ”

“ From the very beginning of its existence, the study of plants has been approached from two widely separated standpoints—the philosophical and the utilitarian. Regarded from the first point of view, Botany stands on its own merits, as an integral branch of natural philosophy, whereas, from the second, it is merely a by-product of medicine or agriculture. ”

“ The medicinal properties of plants are thus the outcome of qualities that are not obvious at sight. How, then, is the physician to be guided in selecting herbal remedies to cure the several ailments of his patients? The answer to this question given by Paracelsus is summed up in what is known as the Doctrine of Signatures. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The question as to which groups among the Flowering Plants [Angiosperms] are to be considered as relatively primitive, is still, at the present day, an open one, but it would be generally conceded that Bauhin’s arrangement cannot be accepted. There is little doubt, from the standpoint of modern botany, that the Grasses are a highly specialised group, while the “tree habit” has been adopted independently by many plants belonging to entirely different cycles of affinity, and thus, except in rare cases, it cannot be used as a criterion of relationship. ”

“ Egenolph was evidently a keen man of business, for he made his figures do duty over and over again. He used them not only as illustrations to the herbal, but as a separate publication, without any letter-press, and also in conjunction with an entirely unrelated text, such, for example, as a Latin version of Dioscorides. Many later editions of the Kreutterbůch appeared, and to these a number of figures were added, chiefly copies, on a reduced scale, from those of Bock, who had himself made considerable use of the drawings in the octavo edition of Fuchs’ herbal. ”

“ For the fact is that in every art, theory must be disconnected and separated from practice, and the two must be dealt with singly and individually in their proper order before they are united. And for that reason, in order that Botany (which is, as it were, a special branch of Physics) may form a unit by itself before it can be brought into connection with other sciences, it must be divided and unyoked from Medicine.”
Guy de la Brosse, a French writer of the seventeenth118 century, discusses the souls of plants and related topics, quite in the manner of the Aristotelian school. ”

“ We might almost say that there were only five collections of wood-cuts of plants of really first-rate importance—those, namely, of Brunfels, Fuchs, Mattioli, and Plantin, with those of Gesner and Camerarius, all of which were published in the sixty years between 1530 and 1590. The wood-blocks of the two botanists last mentioned cannot be considered apart from one another; from the scientific point of view they show a marked advance, in the introduction of enlarged sketches of the flowers and fruit, in addition to the habit drawings. ”

“ It is not systematic botany alone that we owe in the first instance to medicine. Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) , one of the founders of the science of plant anatomy, was led to embark upon this subject because his anatomical studies as a physician suggested to him that plants, like animals, probably possessed an internal structure worthy of investigation, since they were the work of the same Creator. ”

“ Botany as a branch of philosophy may be said to have owed its inception to the wonderful mental activity of the finest period of Greek culture. It was at this time that the nature and life of plants first came definitely within the scope of inquiry and speculation. ”

“ Christophe’s reputation grew to such an extent that great efforts were made, in various quarters, to tempt him from Antwerp. The Duke of Savoy and Piedmont, for instance, did all he could to persuade him to come to Turin, promising him extensive printing works and all necessary funds—but he remained faithful to the city of his adoption. Perhaps the most potent factor in his success was his keen judgment of men, which enabled him so to choose his subordinates that he gathered around him an unrivalled staff. ”