LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 221 



degrees in medicine and in theology. In other cases there is or- 

 dinarily no doubt of the date of the conferring of a degree, or of the 

 admission to sacred orders. Upon these several points, each 

 of prime importance to even the briefest sketch of the career of 

 a noted scholar, physician and clergyman, Tragus' biographers 

 from Melchior Adam away back in the year 1620, down to Ernst 

 Meyer in 1857, are silent. Not one of them names a school of 

 any grade, or of any profession, which the man was known to have 

 attended; and if any should suspect Tragus of having been a 

 medical practitioner without a diploma, and of having enjoyed as a 

 Protestant layman the income of a large Catholic parochial en- 

 dowment, there is not a line in the most authentic biographies, as I 

 have read them, by which to allay either suspicion. 



Tragus was born at Heidesbach, not very far from Heidelberg, 

 in the year 1498. Concerning the estate of his parents as poor, or 

 as in easy circumstances, nothing is known. As a youth he was found 

 uncommonly well educated; whence Meyer inferred that the parents 

 were well to do. That inference may as easily be wrong as right. 1 

 At the monasteries of the period there was free education for boys 

 of intelligence and promise, if their parents were poor. Meyer, 

 writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, should have be- 

 thought himself of this, that in the Germany of Jerome Bock's 

 boyhood Luther and the reformation had not yet appeared, and 

 monasteries were everywhere. The biographers all affirm the 

 disappointment of the parents at the young man's final and very 

 fixed determination not to become a monk; and the disappointment 

 seems to imply that he had been placed under monastic influence, 

 and on their part hopefully. 



The considerable views which we obtain of Tragus' life here and 

 there do not show him always happily circumstanced, but rather 

 more commonly as acquainted with adversity. Physically he was 

 a consumptive. Even out of the ten children born to him eight 

 died young; and he survived also the mother of them. It is in the 

 year 1523, when he is twenty-five years old, that we find him settled 

 in Zweibrucken, under the appointment of the Palgrave Ludewig, 

 as a school teacher, and also as in charge of gardens of this prince, 

 which he is said to have enriched with many plants. 2 This favor- 

 able incumbency Tragus seems to have held for some nine years, and 

 came to an end in 1532 by the death of the Palgrave Ludewig. 

 Quite before this date we should have found Martin Luther a central 



1 Geschichte der Botanik, vol. iv, p. 303. 

 J Meyer, Ibid. 



