Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/101

 Aristotle's biology Aristotle's work on Plants is not extant. To judge from the passages touching this subject, which are scattered through his other works,^^ his botanical observations were less penetrat- ing than his zoological. Yet it is not well to judge him from these fragments, when his main work is lost. We pass at once to the writings of his but slightly younger disciple, Theophrastus. The latter's Enquiry Into Plants " is the great classical botany, and is more clearly written and better put together than his De Causis Plantarum.^* No more than Aristotle himself, is Theophrastus to be taken as the first botanist. Much thought had already been de- voted to plant life and to the medical properties of plants, for instance, by the Hippocratic school. His work is far from primitive, yet the author still wanders in a maze, since he has not reached a satisfactory or, so to speak, " natural " system of classification. Here Greek botany remained behind Greek zoology, and one may say at once that the Enquiry Into Plants has by no means the philosophical interest of Aristotle's works on zoology, nor is it as suggestive or useful for the modern stu- dent. Indeed, the view of at least one able [79]