commenced the business of agriculture. When sickness invaded, and remedies were needed, the sovereign tasted the various plants to ascertain their cooling and tranquillizing properties, and in one day discovered seventy kinds of poisonous shrubs, with their antidotes, which he described in a book; and the science of medicine began to flourish. Since then, the Chinese have published a very compendious work on botany, called the Pun-tsaou, which is certainly the result of much labour, and, considering their disadvantages, does them great credit. In this work they distinguish plants into class, genus, and variety. Their classes are five; viz., shrubs, grains, herbs, fruits, and trees. Under the first class they include the following genera: wild, odoriferous, marshy, poisonous, rocky, scandent, watery, cryptogamous, and miscellaneous plants; under the second class they enumerate wheat, barley, millett, maize, and other grains; under the third class are found alliaceous, mucilaginous, creeping, watery, and fungous vegetables; under the fourth class we meet with cultivated, wild, and foreign, as also aromatic and watery fruits; and under the fifth class are included odoriferous, gigantic, luxuriant, parasitic, flexible, and miscellaneous trees. All these genera are subsequently divided into 1094 species. This arrangement will be seen to be far from scientific; but that they should have examined the vegetable kingdom at all, and made any sort of classification, shews that they are by no means an unthinking or an uncivilized people.
To the science of medicine the Chinese have paid some attention; but, as usual, were more celebrated for it in former than in latter times. The systems of their
