Enquiry into Plants

PREFACE.

a few indeed in passing, as they were known to all of his own time, but the majority most accurately: those individuals, to be sure, with no regard having been paid to methodical order or systematic Nomenclature. As often as there was mention of the habit of any plant, or of its parts, and especially when certain medicinal powers were to be investigated, so often did he collect, as I might say, small bundles of related plants in different books of his work; whence it happens that the same species frequently recurs. Hence arose the weariness of the botanists of the previous century, to which must perhaps be added the difficulties arising as much from the technical and unusual language as from the corruption of the text.

The text of Theophrastus is, of course, everywhere most corrupt; and if you examine the manuscript codices, written with confluent letters and teeming everywhere with abbreviations of words, it will seem not at all surprising that the matter should be so^b; especially if you remember that their copyists were entirely ignorant of botanical science. The text of Homer is indeed the most accurate of all, being in heroic meter,

^b It will be worth the effort to transcribe what M. Camus, the most celebrated editor of Aristotle’s Natural History, observed long ago on this matter: "The abbreviations very much in use in Greek MSS., and the ligatures composed of several letters, have given rise to many errors in the editions of these books, whether because of the difficulty of guessing some of them, or because of their resemblance to other letters."
Discourse on Aristotle, p. xxxv.