Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/49

Rh M. Chwolson needs that especial date—the Ionians may have had dealings with the Babylonians. But the passages, where there is mention of the Yúnánís, are quite at variance with such an explanation. The subject there is, in fact, that the Greeks were a learned nation, possessing a cultivated literature. Such passages do not carry us, I maintain, to the days of the Heraclituses and the Thales’, who wrote scarcely anything, and whose writings had but little publicity; but to an epoch when the works of the Greek authors were spread throughout the East. In the chapter on the mallow, the author, speaking of the properties of the plant and its uses in medicine, says that it belongs to cold plants, and adds: “The Greeks are of another opinion; they think that this plant is moderately warm, that it alleviates pain, and that it softens hard tumours.” Dr. Chwolson makes vain efforts to prove that we should not conclude from this that