170 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



as at the distance of four hundred years we may, the incidents that 

 had to do with the moulding of the youth, and helped to establish 

 the character of the man. 



The birthplace of Otto Brunfels was Mayence, or Mainz. The 

 family had taken its name from Castle Brunsfels 1 not far from 

 Mainz where the earlier ancestry of the botanist had lived. At 

 Mainz, John Brunsfels, the father, was in the business of a cooper; 

 appears to have been in comfortable if not affluent circumstances; 

 was well known and much respected as a man of character and 

 high integrity; also, as we learn by his opposition to young Otto's 

 plans, a man with a will and purposes of his own; qualities inherited 

 by the son, as we shall see. Otto was the only son, and entertained 

 the thought of devoting himself to the service of the Church. 

 At that time Martin Luther was yet unborn and all Germany was 

 Catholic. 2 A Catholic father of that period, if rich or well to do, 

 would have been a marvel of pious unworldliness, if he had been 

 willing that his only son should become a clergyman; for that would 

 mean the immediate extinction of his own branch of an ancestral 

 line. This father of young Otto Brunfels was resolute and persist- 

 ent in his opposition to the son's wish; and naturally so; and this 

 must have continued until the son was of legal age; for at last, hope- 

 less of otherwise attaining to the priesthood, he left home and 

 became a novice in the Carthusian monastery that was in his 

 native town. This he would not have been permitted to do had 

 he been a mere youth, unless the father had given consent. 



Meyer's inference that Brunfels remained but three or four years 

 an inmate of the monastery 3 proceeded from several misunderstand- 

 ings, one of which was that the man had not been born until a little 

 before the year 1500. But there is now good authority for our 

 accepting 1464 as the year of the botanist's nativity; so that in 

 1500 he was already thirty-six years old. Then, since to assume 

 a part in the new Lutheran movement was the object of his secret 

 flight from the house of the Carthusians, and that movement was 

 hardly well under way before 1517, it becomes highly probable that 

 the man was fifty-three years of age when, renouncing monasticism 

 and giving his learning and talents to the support of Luther's 

 cause, he took up the sojourn at Strassburg. He betook himself 



i Brunsfels, rather than Brunfels, was the family name. In some of 

 our author's earlier works he wrote it Brunsfelsius; but later he appears 

 to have changed it to Brunfelsius. 



Otto Brunfels was born in 1464, Martin Luther in 1483. 



3 Geschichte der Botanik, vol. iv, p. 296. 



