ABSTRACT
The books of Ursinus are typical of that class of publications on the natural history of the Bible described so fitly by Kitto. Kitto has quite aptly summed up the situation in the following words: "The Natural Histories of the Bible form a class by themselves, having less connection than any other with the science of nature. They are rather works of criticism than of natural history—rather the production of philologists than of natural historians. The Bible was not intended by its writers to serve as a textbook of natural history. To the writers of the Scriptures the botanical aspects were strictly secondary and subservient to the moral, ethical, theological, and historical aspects, which were to them of far greater importance and significance. Several authors have written on Biblical botany in the "Gardeners' Chronicle", while as late as 1934 a stimulating paper on "Flowers of the Bible" appeared in "Nature Magazine".
