On the Names of Plants

...to be occupied. This excuse, even if it is of some weight, does not entirely satisfy me. For not even in those things which he hands down does he prove his experience to us: since in very many instances it appears that he pronounces upon the powers of plants and their degrees, as they call them, not in the manner he ought—by proceeding from the primary qualities to the secondary, or by judging them from taste and flavor—but conversely, by passing judgment on the primary qualities from the secondary qualities which Dioscorides and others attribute to them. While this can sometimes be done when the powers of remedies are simple, it cannot be done when the same consist of diverse parts and strengths; much less is it possible to discover the secondary and primary qualities from the tertiary ones, whereas it is easier and more certain to find the secondary and tertiary from the primary. From this I indeed conjecture that those plants in the judging of which he happened to err in the manner I have stated, were either entirely unknown to him, or—through negligence or because he attributed too much to his own judgment—were not tasted while he was writing, nor proven by any experiment. This was also my own opinion some time ago, and I have since understood that Valerius Cordus and certain other men praised for their knowledge of simple medicines felt similarly. The same censure, and even greater, is deserved by Aegineta, Aëtius, and Oribasius, who, just as Galen omitted many medicines of others before him, so they themselves omitted many of Galen’s; and furthermore, they attributed so much to his authority that they never departed even a hair's breadth from his judgment, and added almost nothing at all of their own, but repeated everything of theirs from Galen, either in the same words or somewhat more briefly. Therefore, in this regard I would much more praise the Arabs, who, among other things changed from the Greeks, added many things here and there of their own that were unknown to the Greeks. But for these men there was a greater opportunity to do this, as they lived in another part of the world and at a later time. There is also attributed to Galen a book on simples addressed to Paternianus, which is circulated only in Latin—and poor Latin at that—with no name of a translator added; indeed, I do not think it was translated from the Greek, for it does not exist in Greek. There are 299 chapters, with the medicines listed in the order of the Latin alphabet. Certain barbarous and Arabic words are present in it. Nothing, if I am not mistaken, is read in it that we do not have handed down better and more purely by other authors. Likewise, a small book on the lesser centaury.

We have Galen’s book on 46 plants with the commentary of Humain [Hunayn] and Gentilis.

Theophrastus cites the opinion of Cleodemus on the generation of plants in Historia Plantarum 3.2, where in Greek it is read as Κλειόδημος, but elsewhere as Κλείδημος, Clidemus, as in Book 5, chapter 12 of De Causis [Plantarum], where he speaks of the diseases of trees; and in the first book, chapter 10 of the same work, inquiring into the cause of why they sprout more in a warm winter than in a cold summer.

The name of the physician Cleophantus is frequently read in the history of Pliny from Book 20 onwards.