Mediæval Natural History in Poland 1

Abstract

THERE are few more interesting occupations than to trace the growth of scientific knowledge in the field of natural history. We are heirs of the labours of our forefathers, who were fain to struggle through obscure and devious paths to build up the mass of information on these subjects with which we are furnished. We find them living in a wonderland of the strangest credulity and superstition, and their errors have only gradually disappeared in the process of scientific investigation. With herbs, animals and precious stones were connected the wildest theories. Folk-lore played a busy part; the mandrake uttered groans when it was pulled up; the toad had a jewel in its head; the barnacle was half herb and half animal, and the barometz was a lamb which partook of a vegetable nature. These beliefs have slowly died out, but Sir Thomas Browne, who lived so recently as the latter part of the seventeenth century, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica wrote a book against the delusions of his countrymen, himself believing in many absurdities. The medicinal uses to which animals and herbs were applied strike us forcibly in these modern times. The scientific medical man of the nineteenth century was to be slowly evolved out of the medicine-man and conjurer. Nor are the two last entirely gone; they still may be found in the less civilised parts of Europe and in the more unfrequented nooks of our own country. We have no space to enumerate here the old works treating of popular therapeutics in England, such as the Anglo-Saxon medical books edited by the late Oswald Cockayne, in 1864, under the fantastic title, “Leechcraft and Wortcunning.” The late Mr. Mowat, of Oxford, published two contributions on the subject in his Alphita and Sinonoma Bartholomaei. Many other works could be cited in English literature, but the immediate object of our article is to call the attention of our readers to the two volumes which have appeared from the pen of Mr. Joseph Rostafinski, professor of botany in the University of Cracow, and the title of which is given at the foot of p. 615. Prof. Rostafinski has furnished lists of the names of plants, animals, minerals and various kinds of herbs which were known in Poland from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The greater part of these names are preserved in manuscript vocabularies in the libraries of Cracow (especially the so-called Jagiellon), Lemberg, Prague and St. Petersburg. Some of these vocabularies first became known in the pages of the Warsaw review, Prace Filologiczne, to which they were contributed by Prof. Brückner, of Berlin, one of the foremost Polish scholars.