History of Botany (1530-1860)

The authors of the oldest herbals of the 16th century Brunfels Fuchs Bock Mattioli and others regarded plants mainly as the vehicles of medicinal virtues; to them plants were the ingredients in compound medicines and were therefore by preference termed ‘simplicia’ simple constituents of medicaments. Their chief object was to discover the plants employed by the physicians of antiquity the knowledge of which had been lost in later times. The corrupt texts of Theophrastus Dioscorides Pliny and Galen had been in many respects improved and illustrated by the critical labours of the Italian commentators of the 15th and of the early part of the 16th century; but there was one imperfection which no criticism could remove—the highly unsatisfactory descriptions of the old authors or the entire absence of descriptions. It was moreover at first assumed that the plants described by the Greek physicians must grow wild in Germany also and generally in the rest of Europe; each author identified a different native plant with some one mentioned by Dioscorides or Theophrastus or others and thus there arose as early as the 16th century a confusion of nomenclature which it was scarcely possible to clear away. As compared with the efforts of the philological commentators who knew little of plants from their own observation a great advance was made by the first German composers of herbals who went straight to nature described the wild plants growing around them and had figures of them carefully executed in wood. Thus was made the first beginning of a really scientific examination of plants though the aims pursued were not yet truly scientific for no questions were proposed as to the nature of plants their organisation or mutual relations; the only point of interest was the knowledge of individual forms and of their medicinal virtues. The descriptions were at first extremely inartistic and unmethodical; but the effort to make them as exact and clear as was possible led from time to time to perceptions of truth that came unsought and lay far removed from the object originally in view. It was remarked that many of the plants which Dioscorides had described in his Materia Medica do not grow wild in Germany France Spain and England and that conversely very many plants grow in these countries which were evidently unknown to the ancient writers; it became apparent at the same time that many plants have points of resemblance to one another which have nothing to do with their medicinal powers or with their importance to agriculture and the arts. In the effort to promote the knowledge of plants for practical purposes by careful description of individual forms the impression forced itself on the mind of the observer that there are various natural groups of plants which have a distinct resemblance to one another in form and in other characteristics. It was seen that there were other natural alliances in the vegetable world beside the three great divisions of trees shrubs and herbs adopted by Aristotle and Theophrastus. The first perception of natural groups is to be found in Bock and later herbals show that the natural connection between such plants as occur together in the groups of Fungi Mosses Ferns Coniferae Umbelliferae Compositae Labiatae Papilionaceae was distinctly felt though it was by no means clearly understood how this connection was actually expressed; the fact of natural affinity presented itself unsought as an incidental and indefinite impression to which no great value was at first attached. The recognition of these groups required no antecedent philosophic reflection or conscious attempt to classify the objects in the vegetable world; they present themselves to the unprejudiced eye as naturally as do the groups of mammals birds reptiles fishes and worms in the animal kingdom.