All branches of knowledge relating to nature passed through many stages, and were influenced by the prevailing habits and methods of thought of the age. The wonderful, the mysterious, the marvellous, the union of poetry with true and false religion, the struggle between the desire for truth and fear of the persecution of the ignorant, and the victory of cultivated observation and reason, all followed, in order, during the history of the progress of every science. A great writer states that it cannot then surprise us that the earliest lore concerning plants, which we discover in the records of the past, consists of mythological legends, marvellous relations, and extraordinary medicinal qualities. To the lively fancy of the Greeks, the narcissus, which bends its head over the stream, was originally a youth who, in such an attitude, became enamoured of his own beauty. The hyacinth, on whose flower certain markings are to be traced resembling the Greek expression of grief (ΑΙΑΙ), recorded the sorrow of the god Apollo for the death of his favourite Hyacinthus. The beautiful lotus of India, which floats with its splendid flower on the surface of the water, is the chosen seat of the goddess Lackshmi, the daughter of Ocean. In Egypt, the god Osiris swam on a lotus leaf, and the lotus-eaters of Homer lost their love of home immediately. These legends and odd fancies, although believed in by the populace of the Eastern nations until a late period in history, were of great antiquity and under different names of gods and plants, heroes and flowers had been handed down from the dawn of civilization. Yet this was not all the knowledge about plants in those early years. The more thoughtful amongst men began to recognize plants by name and to study their uses. Some men were hunters and shepherds, but with them were those who, with gentler spirit, tilled the ground and stored the fruits of the earth. What these were, can be learned from the pictures in Egyptian paintings. The corn of Egypt was wheat and barley, and it is interesting to know that the wheat was of a kind that must have been produced by skilled cultivation.