ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the deep and metaphysical sense in which the idea of life and living action was by no means absent from the intellectual processes of the scientific revolution. By 1550 the technique of life-like illustration had been mastered, with greatest distinction in the herbals of Brunfels and Fuchs. This technique was ultimately as necessary to botany and zoology as to human anatomy, but it did not occasion any immediate enhancement of the level of botanical knowledge. The philosophic spirit of the Greeks almost perished, and was only revived in the botanical work of Albert the Great. Albert was an Aristotelean botanist-at least, his main authority was a translation of two books on plants then attributed to Aristotle. The experimental has replaced the encyclopaedic method, so that a modern zoologist may find a greater interest in the works of Aristotle than in those of any natural historian of the pre-Darwinian age.
