Page:An Essay on the Antiquity of Hindoo Medicine.djvu/16

 to be acquainted with the sciences which treat of these as objects of Natural history.

Vegetables and their products appear so naturally connected with the healing art, that one of the gods of the East is represented (having assumed the character of a chief physician), as delivering his instructions on the doctrines of medicine, in a forest of medical plants, in the presence of gods, sages, and a large train of both orthodox and heretical hearers. Certainly as plants yielded some of the earliest, so they continue to afford many of the most valuable articles of the Materia Medica of every country of the globe; and the science of vegetation therefore is one of those most closely connected with our subject. Whether we consider the vast variety of beautiful objects brought under review; or the interesting nature of the information which we obtain, by examining into the structure, functions, and properties of each; or the value of the inferences which may be deduced, as applicable to medicine, agriculture, or the arts; there are few that can be compared with it either in variety or value. This statement may appear overstrained to many who have been in the habit of regarding Botany as a science of names only; but it can be so accounted by those alone who, not considering that a multitude of natural objects must necessarily be distinguished by an equal number of names, are appalled by the apparently insurmountable difficulties, and never look from names to the things they indicate. As if a stranger, on entering the vestibule of one of our modern museums, should, from a view of the dilapidated monuments and illegible inscriptions of antiquity, pronounce at once upon their uselessness, because he himself was unable in the one to decipher the history of past times, or to read in the other the mind and design of the sculptor or architect.

But we have not to examine the objects of Botany, nor to