CHAPTER VI 

 LEONHARDUS FUCHSIUS, 1501-1566 



AN early and a clear vindication to Brunfelsius of the honor of 

 having made an epoch in the history of botanical iconography is 

 the fact that his Herbarum Viva Icones inspired a younger coun- 

 tryman of his to embark at once in a still larger enterprise of the 

 same kind; this with the manifest purpose of outdoing the originator 

 of the movement. Brunfelsius and Fuchsius were alike in that 

 they were college bred Germans and university graduates; their 

 early and also their later academic and professional training having 

 been acquired in Catholic schools, and mostly while they themselves 

 were yet Catholics ; and they were witnesses of the beginnings of the 

 Lutheran movement, and both became partisans of the Augustin- 

 ian; Brunfels with voice and pen actively and zealously furthering 

 the movement, and Fuchs so expressly in sympathy with it as to 

 have forfeited thereby the professorial chair with which his alma 

 mater had early honored him. Both were regularly graduated 

 medical practitioners, and both eminently successful, even famous, 

 as physicians; though this good fortune came to the elder of the 

 two only very late in life, and after he had abandoned theology 

 and polemics. 



Life. Fuchsius was a native of Memmingen, Bavaria. The 

 father died when the child was in his fifth or sixth year. The 

 small boy must have been precociously intelligent. The care and 

 cost which the widowed mother bestowed on his education, and the 

 academic honors conferred on him in boyhood, youth, and very 

 early manhood attest this. At the age of ten he was sent away to 

 a noted school at Heilbronn, at eleven to Erfurth where, after a 

 year and a half of very special and zealous devotion to what were 

 already his favorite studies, the ancient languages, the university 

 conferred on him the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy; this before 

 he had completed the thirteenth year of his age. During a year 

 and a half, and that while he was somewhere between the ages of 



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