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Rufus of Ephesus, a little junior to Dioscorides, has left us the first formal work on human anatomy and is of some importance in the history of comparative anatomy. In medicine he is memorable as the first to have described bubonic plague, and in surgery for his description of the methods of arresting haemorrhage and his knowledge of the anatomy of the eye.
Aristotle was never a dead hand in Biology as he was in Physics, and this for the reason that he was a great biologist but was not a great physicist. With the advance of the sixteenth century the works of Aristotle, and to a less extent those of Dioscorides and Galen, became the great stimulus to the foundation of a new biological science.
Translated into nearly every language from Anglo-Saxon and Bohemian to Arabic and Hebrew, appearing both abstracted and in full in innumerable beautifully illuminated manuscripts, some of which are still among the fairest treasures of the great national libraries, Dioscorides, the drug-monger, appealed to scholasticized minds for centuries.
Of vegetable products assigned to Media by ancient writers, the most remarkable is the "Median apple," or citron. Pliny says it was the sole tree for which Media was famous, and that it would only grow there and in Persia. Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Virgil, and other writers, celebrate its wonderful qualities, distinctly assigning it to the same region.
The second Christian century brings us two writers who, while scientifically inconsiderable, acted as the main carriers of such tradition of Greek biology as reached the Middle Ages, Pliny and Dioscorides.
This word does not occur in any earlier author, unless Dioscorides lived before that period, which is uncertain. It may be remarked, that the nature, as well as the proper appellation of sugar, must have been but imperfectly, and not generally known, even at the time of the rescript, otherwise the explanatory phrase, honey made from cane, would not have been employed.
In botany the earliest classes formed were trees, shrubs, and herbs: magnitude being the basis of distinction. Dioscorides divided vegetables into aromatic, alimentary, medicinal, and vinous: a division of chemical character.
It therefore endows us with its faculties of evacuation. Thus Dioscorides and his contemporaries must have reasoned; so reasons the peasant of Provence to-day. What would you say, worthy neighbours, if you knew of the virtues of the larva, which is able to mix sufficient mortar with its urine to build a meteorological station and a shaft connecting with the outer world?
Only one thing is changed: Dioscorides advises us to eat the Cigales roasted, but now they are boiled, and the decoction is administered as medicine. The explanation which is given of the diuretic properties of the insect is a marvel of ingenuousness. The Cigale, as every one knows who has tried to catch it, throws a jet of liquid excrement in one's face as it flies away.
In these attempts at maritime discovery, and efforts after a cheaper means of obtaining the Indian products, the Greek sailors of Euergetes made a settlement in the island of Dioscorides, now called Socotara, in the Indian Ocean, forty leagues eastward of the coast of Africa; and there they met the trading vessels from India and Ceylon.
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