History of biology - L. C. Miall

Скачать книгу

to Physiologus is a sufficient proof of this statement. Physiologus is the name given in many languages during a thousand years to the reputed author of popular treatises of zoology, which are also called Bestiaries, or books of beasts. Here it was told how the lion sleeps with open eyes, how the crocodile weeps when it has eaten a man, how the elephant has but one joint in its leg and cannot lie down, how the pelican brings her young back to life by sprinkling them with her own blood. The emblems of the Bestiaries supplied ornaments to mediæval sermons; as late as Shakespeare's day poetry drew from them no small part of her imagery; they were carved on the benches, stalls, porches, and gargoyles of the churches.

      In the last years of the tenth century A.D. faint signs of revival appeared, which became distinct in another hundred years. From that day to our own the progress has been continuous.

       Table of Contents

      By the thirteenth century the rate of progress had become rapid. To this age are ascribed the introduction of the mariner's compass, gunpowder, reading glasses, the Arabic numerals, and decimal arithmetic. In the fourteenth century trade with the East revived; Central Asia and even the Far East were visited by Europeans; universities were multiplied; the revival of learning, painting, and sculpture was accomplished in Italy. Engraving on wood or copper and printing from moveable types date from the fifteenth century. The last decade of this century is often regarded as the close of the Middle Ages; it really marks, not the beginning, but only an extraordinary acceleration, of the new progressive movement, which set in long before. To the years between 1490 and 1550 belong the great geographical discoveries of the Spaniards in the West and of the Portuguese in the East, as well as the Reformation and the revival of science.

      

      PERIOD I.

       Table of Contents

      1530–1660

       Table of Contents

      This is the time of the revival of science; the revival of learning had set in about two centuries earlier. Europe was now repeatedly devastated by religious wars (the revolt of the Netherlands, the wars of the League in France, the Thirty Years' war, the civil war in England). Learning was still mainly classical and scholastic; nearly every writer whom we shall have occasion to name had been educated at a university, and was able to read and write Latin. Two great extensions of knowledge helped to widen the thoughts of men. It became known for the first time that our planet is an insignificant member of a great solar system, and that Christendom is both in extent and population but a small fraction of the habitable globe.

       Table of Contents

      Botany was among the first of the sciences to revive. Its comparatively early start was due to close association with the lucrative profession of medicine. Medicine itself was slow to shake off the unscientific tradition of the Middle Ages, and its backwardness favoured, as it happened, the progress of botany. In the sixteenth century the physician was above all things the prescriber of drugs, and since nine-tenths of the drugs were got from plants, botanical knowledge was reckoned as one of his chief qualifications. All physicians professed to be botanists, and every botanist was thought fit to practise medicine.

      From Fuchs' "Historia Stirpium", 1542. The original occupies a folio page.

      Figure of Solomon's Seal.

      

      Three Germans, who were at once botanists and physicians—Brunfels, Bock, and Fuchs—led the way by publishing herbals, in which the plants of Germany were described and figured from nature. Their first editions appeared in the years 1530, 1539, and 1542. Illustrated herbals were then no novelty, but whereas they had hitherto supplied figures which had been copied time after time until they had often ceased to be recognisable, Brunfels set a pattern of better things by producing what he called "herbarum vivæ eicones," life-like figures of the plants. Each of the three new herbals contained hundreds of large woodcuts. Those engraved for Fuchs are probably of higher artistic quality than any that have appeared since. Each plant, drawn in clear outline without shading, fills a folio page, upon which the text is not allowed to encroach. The botanist will, however, remark that enlarged figures are hardly ever given, so that minute flowers show as mere dots, and that the details of the foliage are not so scrupulously delineated as in modern figures. The text of Brunfels and Fuchs is of little interest, being largely occupied with traditional pharmacy. Bock, whose figures are inferior to those of Brunfels and Fuchs, makes up for this deficiency by his graphic and sometimes amusing descriptions. He delights in natural contrivances, such as the hooks on the twining stem of the hop, or the elastic membrane which throws out the seeds of wood-sorrel. Brunfels has no intelligible sequence of species; Fuchs abandons the attempt to discover a natural succession, and adopts the alphabetical order; Bock aims at bringing together plants which show mutual affinity ("Gewächs einander verwandt"), though such natural groups as he recognises are neither named nor defined.

      Leonhard Fuchs.

       From his Historia Stirpium, 1742.

      

      These three German herbals really deserve to be called scientific. To figure the plants of Germany from the life, to exclude such as existed only in books, and to strive after a natural grouping, was a first step towards a fruitful knowledge of plant-life. It is worth while to dwell for a moment upon the place where these herbals were produced. Along the Rhine civilisation and industry had for many years flourished together. Here and in the country to the east of the great river had sprung up that powerful union of seventy cities known in the thirteenth century as the Confederation of the Rhine; four universities, three of them on the banks of the Rhine, had been founded; here printing and wood-engraving had established themselves in their infancy; here, too, the Reformation found many early supporters. There were historical, economic, and moral reasons why the first printed books on natural history, illustrated by woodcuts drawn from the life, should have been produced in the Rhineland, and why all their authors should have been Protestants. Nearly every sixteenth-century botanist held the same faith.

      The success of the first German herbalists brought a crowd of botanists into the field, among whom were several whose names are still remembered with honour. Gesner of Zurich made elaborate studies for a great history of plants, which he did not live to complete. It was he who first pointed out that the flower and fruit give the best indications of the natural relationships of plants, and his many beautiful enlarged drawings set an example which has done much for scientific botany. Botanists began to understand what natural grouping means, and to recognise that truly natural groups are not to be invented, but discovered. The almost accidental succession adopted by Brunfels, the alphabetical succession of Fuchs, the division according to uses (kitchen-herbs, coronary or garland-flowers, etc.), and the logical, but too formal, method of Cesalpini, in which, as in modern classification, much use was made of the divisions in the ovary—all these were left behind. L'Obel separated, unconsciously and imperfectly, the Monocotyledons from the Dicotyledons, recognised several easily distinguished families of flowering plants (grasses, umbellifers, labiates, etc.), and framed the first synoptic tables of genera.

Скачать книгу