Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/50

34 the Greeks had a scientific system of medicine at the time when “The Agriculture” was composed. Greece, he observes, might very well have had a popular pharmacopœia and such receipts as are found in the heroic age, 1500 years before Christ. Doubtless; but such popular pharmacopœias are not precisely such as are quoted in scientific books, and form a school. It is evident that it here treats of a written Botany, and posterior to Theophrastus. In the chapter on garlic, the author himself says: “Concerning this plant, the Chaldæans tell many tales, in some of which the Greeks agree with them.” Elsewhere the author exults in the coincidence which exists between the opinions of the Greeks and the Chaldæans as regards the influence of the moon on plants. It is not clear that he treats here of a written, regular science no less of the Greeks than of the Chaldæans.

But the most striking passage in “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture” relating