" (Works, III,480 b.)
Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle and his successor, created the
science of botany and made possible the pharmacologists of a few
centuries later. Some of you doubtless know him in another guise--as the
author of the golden booklet on "Characters," in which "the most eminent
botanist of antiquity observes the doings of men with the keen and
unerring vision of a natural historian" (Gomperz). In the Hippocratic
writings, there are mentioned 236 plants; in the botany of Theophrastus,
455. To one trait of master and pupil I must refer--the human feeling,
not alone of man for man, but a sympathy that even claims kinship with
the animal world. "The spirit with which he (Theophrastus) regarded the
animal world found no second expression till the present age" (Gomperz).
Halliday, however, makes the statement that Porphyry(30) goes as far as
any modern humanitarian in preaching our duty towards animals.
(30) W. R. Halliday: Greek Divination, London, Macmillan &
Co., 1913.
ALEXANDRIAN SCHOOL
FROM the death of Hippocrates about the year 375 B.C. till the founding
of the Alexandrian School, the physicians were engrossed largely in
speculative views, and not much real progress was made, except in the
matter of elaborating the humoral pathology.
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