Thus, Platonic philosophy fades from our view in the person of Socrates, proving by _analogy_ the immortality of the soul of man and the soul of the world; and the fatal chill has scarcely risen to his heart when Aristotelian philosophy comes over the horizon, vigorously investigating by _analysis_ the structure and composition of the body of man and the body of the world. Thanks to his friendship with Alexander, Aristotle himself had hitherto unparalleled opportunities for collecting information on every conceivable subject. Knowledge, often inaccurate enough, was garnered from the four quarters of the civilized world, old manuscripts were edited and compared, and, above all, Nature herself was observed in a way which was quite new. After his death his followers went on putting his methods into practice. Side by side with the weighing and measuring went naming. And so to the three or four hundred years which followed we owe a good deal of the technical terminology of our arts and sciences. It was at this time, for instance, that botany first developed into a science. Many of the names of our commonest wildflowers can be traced back to writings of the period, and the following examples are all taken from the first half of the alphabet: _aconite_, _amaranth_, _balsam_, _balm_, _box_, _calamint_, _celandine_, _cherry_, _chestnut_, _chicory_, _germander_, _heliotrope_, _marjoram_, _melilot_. Moreover, nearly all the technical terms of botany are Greek, and though most of them, including the word _botany_ itself, were created later, writers of this period may be said to have given the lead with such learned labels as _calyx_, _perianth_, and _gymnosperm_. When we are “dating” a word in this way, however, we must remember that only a fragment of the whole of Greek literature has come down to us. Thus we cannot be sure, because a flower-name first occurs in a writer of the Alexandrian period, that it was actually created by him or his contemporaries. _Anemone_, _asparagus_, _bugloss_, _celery_, _centaury_, _clematis_, _coriander_, _crocus_, _lily_, _medlar_, and _mint_ all go right back to Classical Greek, while _petal_ and possibly _spore_ are botanical terms which were already in use. On the whole, the Alexandrians probably collected, arranged, and renewed the meanings of more words than they actually created.