The Enquiry into Plants is a treatise in nine books by Theophrastus of Eresus, Aristotle's pupil and his successor at the head of the Lyceum, written at Athens in the late fourth or early third century BCE. It describes plants as Aristotle's writings on animals describe animals: by their parts, their ways of arising and growing, the places where they grow and the uses people make of them. He compares wild and cultivated forms, weighs the reports of farmers, woodcutters and root-cutters, and draws on accounts of Asia and India brought back from Alexander's campaigns.
The arrangement runs from the general to the particular. Book I sets out the parts of plants; Book II treats propagation and the care of cultivated trees, and Book III wild trees. Book IV turns to the trees and plants of particular regions, with papyrus and other water plants, and to the diseases of trees; Book V deals with timber and its uses. Books VI to VIII take the smaller plants: undershrubs and garland flowers, garden herbs and vegetables, then cereals and pulses. Book IX closes the work with saps and gums, frankincense and myrrh, and the drugs of the root-cutters, hellebore and the poisons among them. The nine books survive in medieval manuscripts, with the companion work in six books, On the Causes of Plants.
Theophrastus of Eresus Enquiry into Plants: summary and contents (PDF)
Theophrastus of Eresus Enquiry into Plants: summary and contents (Markdown)
Contents
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Αʹ Book I
Theophrastus begins his survey with the difficulty of saying which parts of a plant count as parts, when flowers, leaves and fruit last only a year. The book compares roots, stems, branches, bark, wood and leaves across kinds, including the banyan's aerial roots and knotted against knotless trees, and sets out the differences between wild and cultivated forms such as wild fig, wild olive and wild pear, before turning to generation.
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Βʹ Book II
Propagation and the care of cultivated trees are the matter of Book II of the Enquiry into Plants. Theophrastus lists the ways plants arise, spontaneously or from seed, root, sucker, branch, twig, stem or cut wood, and which trees grow by which. He gives planting distances for pomegranate, apple, pear, almond, fig and olive, the soils each prefers, and closes on caprification of the fig and the fertilising of female date palms with the flowers of the male.
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Γʹ Book III
Wild trees are taken up after the cultivated ones: how they arise from seed or root, as willows and elms sprang up again at Pheneus in Arcadia after a flood drained, and where each prefers to grow. Theophrastus describes them species by species, comparing the timber of silver fir and pine as the Macedonians and Arcadians report it, and treating beech, yew and many others, ending with a climbing shrub with tendrils, white fragrant flowers and red berries.
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Δʹ Book IV
Trees differ with region and situation: Theophrastus starts from shade-loving firs in a sunless hollow near Crane in Arcadia and the trees of the mountain tops, then turns to the plants of Egypt, Libya, Asia and India. He gives a full account of papyrus, used in Egypt for boats, sails, mats, rope and books and chewed as food, and of other water plants, before ending on the diseases of trees and the harm plants do one another.
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Εʹ Book V
Theophrastus turns to timber: when each wood is best cut, how bark is stripped in spring, which woods rot, warp or split, and which are easy or hard to work, from soft lime to hard holm oak. He reports carpenters' knowledge of heartwood, gives the uses of each timber in ships, houses and furniture, and ends with fire-sticks, the laurel drill, statues that sweat, and worked olive wood that sprouts again.
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Ϛʹ Book VI
In Book VI of the Enquiry into Plants the undershrubs are divided first into spiny and spineless kinds. Theophrastus describes the thistles and their kin, the edible root of the golden thistle, the kaktos, found only in Sicily, and the plant that yields thistle-mastic, then the garland plants: roses, violets and others, with the seasons of their flowering and the effect of place and weather on their scent, noting the fragrant myrtles of Egypt.
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Ζʹ Book VII
Garden vegetables open the account of herbaceous plants. Theophrastus gives the three sowing seasons by the Attic months, with what is sown in each and how fast it comes up, then compares wild forms with cultivated cabbage, turnip, lettuce and celery, and records the medicinal use of wild lettuce juice. He ends with plants that share one name but differ in kind, such as the lotus and the strykhnos, one form edible and others causing sleep or madness.
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Ηʹ Book VIII
Last among the herbaceous plants come the cereals and pulses: wheat, barley and their kin, beans, chickpeas and peas, and the summer crops millet and sesame. Theophrastus discusses the autumn sowing at the setting of the Pleiades that Hesiod followed, how thickly to sow for each soil, ploughing in Syria and Sicily, ending with the weed aigilops, which farmers destroy by leaving a field unsown for two years and grazing it with sheep.
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Θʹ Book IX
Every plant has a sap of its own, and the closing book begins with the gums of fir, pine and terebinth, frankincense, myrrh, balsam and mastic. It goes on to the root-cutters' plants: hellebore, best from Oeta, the black kind named after Melampus, the panaces of Chiron, Asclepius and Heracles, and many purgatives and poisons. Theophrastus notes which peoples commonly suffer from worms and ends with the regions whose drugs are strongest.