when they
separated it was on the relative value of science and poetry. "Science
is vital," said Aristotle; "but poetry and rhetoric are incidental." It
was a little like the classic argument still carried on in all
publishing-houses, as to which is the greater: the man who writes the
text or the man who illustrates it.

One is almost tempted to think that Plato's finest product was
Aristotle, just as Sir Humphry Davy's greatest discovery was Michael
Faraday. One fine, earnest, receptive pupil is about all any teacher
should expect in a lifetime, but Plato had at least two, Aristotle and
Theophrastus. And Theophrastus dated his birth from the day he met
Aristotle.

Theo-Phrastus means God's speech, or one who speaks divinely. The boy's
real name was Ferguson. But the name given by Aristotle, who always had
a passion for naming things, stuck, and the world knows this superbly
great man as Theophrastus.

Botany dates from Theophrastus. And Theophrastus it was who wrote that
greatest of acknowledgments, when, in dedicating one of his books, he
expressed his indebtedness in these words: "To Aristotle, the inspirer
of all I am or hope to be."

* * * * *

After Theophrastus' death the science of botany slept for three hundred
years. During this interval was played in Palestine that immortal drama
which so profoundly influenced the world. Twenty-three years after the
birth of Christ, Pliny, the Naturalist, was born.

He was the uncle of his nephew, and it is probable that the younger man
would have been swallowed in oblivion, just as the body of the older one
was covered by the eager ashes of Vesuvius, were it not for the fact
that Pliny the Elder had made the name deathless.

Pliny the Younger was about such a man as Richard Le Gallienne; Pliny
the Elder was like Thomas A. Edison.

At twenty-two, Pliny the Elder was a Captain in the Roman Army doing
service in Germany. Here he made memoranda of the trees, shrubs and
flowers he saw, and compared them with similar objects he knew at home.
"Animal and vegetable life change as you go North and South; from this I
assume that life is largely a matter of temperature and moisture." Thus
wrote this barbaric Roman soldier, who thereby proved he was not so much
of a barbarian after all. When he was twenty-five, his command was
transferred to Africa, and here, in the moments stolen from sleep, he
wrote a work in three volumes on education, entitl