Botany Post
Hi people this is my intro post for Ancient Greece. In the following post I will talk about 3 sciences in Ancient Greece; Botany, Physics and Astronomy. Botany is the study of plants and was started in Ancient Greece by Thesauratus, an Ancient Greek philosopher. Studying Botany is important because plants are the basis of our ecosystem and everything we eat comes from plants directly or indirectly. Every plant in Ancient Greece had its own myth or god assigned to it to explain its use and creation. The Ancient Greek philosophers were the first people to name plants. Two philosophers in Ancient Greece that studied Botany were Theophrastus and Aristotle. Even though Aristotle contributed to Botany he is more famous for his work with Zoology and he did organize plants into angiosperms and gymnosperms. Theophrastus was the first person to contemplate the idea that plants sexually reproduce and classify plants into monocotyledons and dicotyledonous. Unlike most scientists at that time Theophrastus did more studying of the plants than experimenting with them and had observed 300 plants. Theophrastus is also important because being the first person to ever really study the growth of plants. Until then, people knew very little about the growth of plants and never really saw the value in it. His knowledge of plant growth made him study and become more aware of how climate might affect how plants grow. He started studying how plants grew and behaved differently from plants that grew on other terrain. He knew how frost and wind damaged plants. This is important because without knowing how plants grow, we wouldn't be able to grow food as efficiently as we do today. Even though he had a great passion for growing things, he also studied aquatic vegetation. He studied plants near mountains or rivers to see how they grow compared to other plants. He described successions on river floodplains and stirred soils. Even though he was considered one of the great minds of his time, his approach to research was unencumbered and was not based off any theory; he described things as he saw them. Due to being empirical he came to most of his conclusions through inductive reasoning, though deductive logic was a very common mechanism to solve problems in ancient Greece. Even though Theophrastus was the father of Botany he made no real advances in Botany and there was no tangible information on Botany till the 15th century. Look at the pink words in the dictionary page.
http://taxusbaccata.hubpages.com/hub/History-of-Botany-Part-1-from-Neolithic-Revolution-until-the-Middle-Ages
http://science.jrank.org/pages/996/Botany.htm l
http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10551453
http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/sites/harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/files/publications/pdfs/Raup_AnnAssocAmGeographers_1942.pdf
http://botany.about.com/od/HistoryBotany/a/Early-Botanists.htm
http://www.theoi.com/Flora1.html
http://taxusbaccata.hubpages.com/hub/History-of-Botany-Part-1-from-Neolithic-Revolution-until-the-Middle-Ages
http://science.jrank.org/pages/996/Botany.htm l
http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10551453
http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/sites/harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/files/publications/pdfs/Raup_AnnAssocAmGeographers_1942.pdf
http://botany.about.com/od/HistoryBotany/a/Early-Botanists.htm
http://www.theoi.com/Flora1.html
Multi-Media
One plant Theophrastus discovered. (Plantarum Maioricarum)