Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE USE OF SIMPLES IN the language of the old herbalists, a " simple " was the general term for any herb or plant which was supposed to possess medicinal properties. According to the curious belief of the time, every plant in the Materia medica was held to contain its own particular virtue, and therefore to constitute a " simple " remedy. Hence herbs were simples; and in the botanical litera- I ture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an expedition in search of plants was frequently termed a " simpling-voyage" or a " simpling-journey," while an apothecary skilled in the knowledge of herbs is designated by Gerarde " a learned and diligent searcher of simples." The term has now become obsolete, but it may serve to remind us of a curious branch of learning which was once identified with the practice of medicine. In ancient times "whatever was scientific in the art of medicine was centred in the study of herbs, and the materials of the healing art were wholly vegetable." The mineral and chemical remedies are of comparatively modern introduction, and date mainly from the Arabic physicians of the Middle Ages. This priority of herbal medicines, as Professor Earle has pointed out, has left its trace in the vocabulary of our language. The term drug, he tells us, " is from the Anglo-Saxon drigan, to dry; and drugs were at first dried herbs.Thus the study of plants was identified with" medicine by inveterate tradition; and when, in the sixteenth century, with the beginnings of modern botany, the chief cities of Europe established gardens for study, they were called Physic Gardens." The first of these public physic gardens appears to have been founded at Padua in the year IS33.; this was quickly followed by similar institutions at Zurich, at Bologna, and at Cologne. In Englan...