LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 265 



Botanologicon, which closed his career as an author. This was 

 published at Cologne in 1534. In this he complains of oppositions 

 and persecutions which he has had to endure at Marburg, such as 

 had compelled him to accept a proffered appointment as City 

 Physician at Biemen, to the Senate and Citizens of which city the 

 book is dedicated. He died at Bremen in 1535, at the age of 49 

 years. 



The Botanologicon. 1 The book is in the form of a colloquy 

 between Cordus and a few friends of his, most of them away back in 

 their younger years fellow students at Erfurth, all now men of 

 middle age, physicians, pharmacists, or men otherwise interested in 

 plants, at least the medicinal. As having been university students 

 of medicine every one of them is assumed to be somewhat familiar 

 with all the ancient line of Greek and Roman authors who had 

 written on the materia medica, and whose books were still the 

 standards of study and reference. 



Euricius Cordus, even while young, and as yet aiming at nothing 

 else but distinction in languages and philology, had been a great 

 lover and cultivator of plants, training his child Valerius from 

 infancy to know and love them. Then when through mad religious 

 partisanship the universities of Germany began to suffer disruption 

 and depletion, 2 and Cordus with a family on his hands was obliged 

 to prepare for a remunerative calling, he was trebly prepared to 

 make a mark in botany. He was a genius. He was intensely a 

 lover of plants. He was uncommonly well skilled in those ancient 

 languages in which the old standards of the materia medica had 

 been written. 



The useful purposes which the Botanologicon has in view are 

 several, and are essentially reformatory. Prominent among 

 them is that of demonstrating that, through sheer ignorance, a 

 considerable proportion of the jars and drawers and packets in 

 the drug shops are falsely labelled. They are marked with the 

 names of Diocoridean and Galenian roots and herbs, while commonly 

 filled with things which can not be the same as those which the 

 ancients knew and made much of under those names. If this was 

 really the case it would follow that the lives of those in illness calling 

 for a certain powerful remedy, were apt to be endangered by the 

 administration, either of some drug wholly inert, or else with pro- 



1 Euricii Cordi Simesusii Medici Botanologicon. Coloniae, apud Joannem 

 Gymnicum, Anno 1534. 



* The Botanologicon abounds in expressions deploring the adverse influence 

 of the religious dissensions of the time upon the universities of Germany. 



