INTRODUCTION
it is bequeathed to certain specified friends and to those who will spend their time with them in learning and philosophy; the testator is to be buried in it without extravagant expense, a custodian is appointed, and provision is made for the emancipation of various gardeners, so soon as they have earned their freedom by long enough service.
According to Diogenes Theophrastus died at the age of eighty-five. He is made indeed to say in the probably spurious Preface to the 'Characters' that he is writing in his ninety-ninth year; while St. Jerome's Chronicle asserts that he lived to the age of 107. Accepting Diogenes' date, we may take it that he died about 285 b.c.; it is said that he complained that "we die just when we are beginning to live." His life must indeed have been a remarkably full and interesting one, when we consider that he enjoyed the personal friendship of two such men as Plato and Aristotle, and that he had witnessed the whole of the careers of Philip and Alexander of Macedon. To Alexander indeed he was directly indebted; the great conqueror had not been for nothing the pupil of the encyclopaedic Aristotle. He took with him to the East scientifically trained observers, the results of whose observations were at Theophrastus' disposal. Hence it is that his descriptions of plants are not limited to the flora of Greece and the Levant; to the reports of Alexander's followers he owed his accounts of such plants as the cotton-plant, banyan, pepper, cinnamon, myrrh and
