Heroes of Science

CHAPTER XIII.. The Life of Lyell.

THE LIFE OF LYELL.

The study of existing nature and its changes undertaken in order to comprehend the past changes during geological ages—The uniformity of natural operations under law—Catastrophes abolished—The succession of life on the globe, and that of the tertiary ages explained—The antiquity of man and of the great ice age established 307

HEROES OF SCIENCE.

CHAPTER I.. The Infancy of the Knowledge of the Science of Plants.

THE INFANCY OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE SCIENCE OF PLANTS.

Old fancies and notions about plants—Aristoteles, the first botanist—Theophrastus—Plinius—Dioscorides—Their lives, labours, and troubles.

Everybody likes to gather flowers for the sake of their beauty and scent, and most young people ask the names and the uses of the plants which grow them. These appear to have been the questions that the earliest races of men sought to answer for themselves. They gave plants names, and ascribed some truthful and a great many very curious and false properties to them. Many of the first races of men lived on fruits, vegetables, and roots, and it became important to know good and nourishing plants from those which were poisonous. The ablest men of the tribes, probably, studied the names which had been given by custom to many plants; and the healing power of some plants, and the poisonous nature of others began to be known; the good and ill-disposed amongst men endeavoured to learn all about them. Thus the first steps in the science of plants were to name them, and to ascribe properties to them. It has often been noticed that there is some resemblance between the history of the progress of a science, during all the ages of civilization, and that of the rise and progress of one in the child, youth, and man. The child receives everything that it is told, as a truth, and loves the wonderful; the youth likes to hear of mysteries, and his emotions and poetic feeling lead him to desire general truths; and the man criticizes what he has been told, tries to learn for himself, and longs for exact knowledge and the absolute truth. So in the early days of civilization, men believed in everything that was told them, and ascribed wonderful properties to the nature around them which they saw was so beautiful and yet often so terrible. As the world got older, curious legends were associated with truths and falsities; and with the general diffusion of learning, and the careful exercise of the reasoning powers, knowledge became more exact and useful, and was followed for truth’s sake.

All branches of knowledge relating to nature passed through many stages, and were influenced by the prevailing habits and methods of thought of the age. The wonderful, the mysterious, the marvellous, the union of poetry with true and false religion, the struggle between the desire for truth and fear of the persecution of the ignorant, and the victory of cultivated observation and reason, all followed, in order, during the history of the progress of every science. A great writer states that it cannot then surprise us that the earliest lore concerning plants, which we discover in the records of the past, consists of mythological legends, marvellous relations, and extraordinary medicinal qualities. To the lively fancy of the Greeks, the narcissus, which bends its head over the stream, was originally a youth who, in such an attitude, became enamoured of his own beauty. The hyacinth, on whose flower certain markings are to be traced resembling the Greek expression of grief (ΑΙΑΙ), recorded the sorrow of the god Apollo for the death of his favourite Hyacinthus. The beautiful lotus of India, which floats with its splendid flower on the surface of the water, is the chosen seat of the goddess Lackshmi, the daughter of Ocean. In Egypt, the god Osiris swam on a lotus leaf, and the lotus-eaters of Homer lost their love of home immediately.

These legends and odd fancies, although believed in by the populace of the Eastern nations until a late period in history, were of great antiquity and under different names of gods and plants, heroes and flowers had been handed down from the dawn of civilization. Yet this was not all the knowledge about plants in those early years. The more thoughtful amongst men began to recognize plants by name and to study their uses. Some men were hunters and shepherds, but with them were those who, with gentler spirit, tilled the ground and stored the fruits of the earth. What these were, can be learned from the pictures in Egyptian paintings. The corn of Egypt was wheat and barley, and it is interesting to know that the wheat was of a kind that must have been produced by skilled cultivation.

The vine comes early into notice in the Bible, and it had been studied, for wine was made of its fruit. Solomon loved nature, because it brought him into the presence of truth and beauty, and he “spoke of trees from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.” This was part of his wisdom. And the great traveller, Herodotus, shows us that a taste for natural history had, in his time, found a place in the mind of the Greeks—a great race who followed after the first child-like nature-studies of the Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians had merged into real knowledge. In speaking of the luxuriant vegetation of the plains of Babylon—now dreary wastes—he is so far from desiring to astonish merely, that he says “the blades of wheat and barley are full four fingers wide; but as to the size of the trees which grow from millet and sesame, though I could mention it I will not, knowing well that those who have not been in that country will hardly believe what I have said already.” It is clear that when the Greeks were in the child-like stage of plant lore, the older races had passed it, and were successful cultivators of plants that had required much study to turn to use. But the Greeks soon made amends, and the teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristoteles, tried to arrange plants, and to classify them according to their peculiarities. Plants and herbs had been long used as medicine, and the poisonous properties of aconite had been employed to destroy one of the noblest men of old, before this time, so that this celebrated naturalist had the knowledge, which had been accumulating for centuries, to put in order and to arrange.

Aristoteles was born at Stageira, in the year 384 B.C., and it is interesting to note that his wonderful love of nature was fostered by, and, indeed, probably arose from the profession of his father. His father was the physician and friend of Amyntas, King of Macedonia, and his mother was a descendant of the great physician Æsculapius. The young Aristoteles lost both his parents at an early period of his life, but the son of Amyntas, called Philip, was his friend, and kind people brought the boy up. We know nothing of the boy’s habits or method of life; but it can be readily understood by those who read these lives, and have had a love of nature, before the experience of such a calamity as the loss of parents, that many an hour of sorrow was shortened and solaced by studying the graceful and blooming plants and the movements and habits of animals. Certain it is that the boy loved study, and it soon became evident that his loss was compensated, as it is very often in such cases, by a spirit of self-reliance. In his eighteenth year he went to Athens to study the healing art. When Aristoteles was about twenty-one years of age, the philosopher Plato returned from Sicily, and the young man then seems to have cared more for the study of the sciences which were requisite for a polished physician, than for the art of healing. He made his first self-sacrifice, as many a man has done since; he gave up the uncertainties of the art of curing diseases, and learned natural history and philosophy. His eagerness for knowledge and his extraordinary acuteness and sagacity doubtless attracted Plato’s notice, who soon called him “the intellect of the school,” and said his house was “the house of the reader.” As Aristoteles grew up, his early training and his love of the truth seen in nature, began to separate him from the common run of men, and his self-reliance began to make him an antagonist to the teachings even of the great Plato. But this opposition was not that of a vain and conceited young man. Plato had noticed his ability, and he was really a man of mark, whose opinions were valuable. Aristoteles studied facts, and knew many truths about natural history, but his wonderful master cared more for ideas. Such men must always clash, and Aristoteles writes in one of his books about his opposition to the philosophy of Plato, that it is painful to refute the doctrine of ideas, as it has been introduced by persons who were his friends; “nevertheless it is a duty to disregard such private feelings, for both philosophers and truth are dear to me, but it is right to give the preference to truth.” Truth! what is truth? said Pilate, and turned from the true. The Creator’s light, seen with our longing eyes, precious beyond conception, the sweetest solace of intellect; what is, what was—yet not to be defined by finite man. The very root of science, it is that which we are to hold in our consciences against all opposition. Appreciated by the savage, dear to pagan, the pride of the Christian, the giver of confidence amongst all men. Hard to get at, yet it is at the foundation of all those branches of knowledge which relate to the study of the Creation. Aristoteles studied natural history, that is, the plants and animals which came before him, especially. He recorded their description, noted their reproduction, and tried to make out their resemblances. He noticed the growth of things, and the decay of the surface of the earth, and having the facts and truths before him, he argued upon them. His master, Plato, was not a naturalist, but accepting the truths handed down to him by those who were observers of nature, he generalized about them, and got ideas by thinking out the bearings of the truths. He loved the ideal, and wrote, “Behold this world! You will find that its efficient cause is God, by whom it was brought into being; its moving cause, the goodness of the Creator.” He could no more occupy time by studying the structure of the flowers, plants, and sea-shells, than Aristoteles could in imagining or speculating on the causes of things. Both desired the truth, and tried to get it in different manners; but as at the present day there are moral philosophers and naturalists with totally different kinds of mind and habits of thought, so in those old days the master and pupil never worked together. The master gave way to his grand imagination, and the pupil was strictly a matter-of-fact man.

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