SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



As to when, and amid what surroundings Fuchsius became in- 

 terested in botany, I have met with no record. It may, however, 

 safely be assumed that no passion for nature study, or for plants 

 in particular, was congenital with him. There is internal evidence 

 in his book that as a botanist he was not born but made. The 

 curricula of the schools of medicine at that period offered the possi- 

 bilities, at least, of the making of botanists. The medicines in 

 use were still chiefly plant products, either native or imported from 

 Asia. The names of them were plant names. Each was the sub- 

 ject of a chapter in the standard books of the materia medica. 

 Those books were all ancient, and had been written by the Greeks, 

 Hippocrates, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Galenos. Their chapters 

 were the texts on which university professors of medicine lectured 

 to their students; and the identification of the plants more or less 

 succinctly described in those classic chapters was a part of the 

 regular work. It was the examination of plants in the light of 

 what purported to be the original and authentic descriptions of 

 them. Critical work of this kind may be done by a student as a 

 piece of drudgery, or it may become an inspiration. To those 

 not too sluggish it must have been stimulating to be able to demon- 

 strate by Greek texts ten or fifteen centuries old that the vendors of 

 drugs were selling important medicines under wrong names; that 

 what they sold under the Greek name aristolochia, for example, 

 was not in the least like what the great Greek physicians had used 

 under that name either morphologically or qualitatively. And 

 if such questions took them to the drug gardens, or led them afield 

 into wild places in search of medicinal plants in their fresh and 

 growing condition, all this would tend to the fuller development 

 and the deepening of a sincere interest in botany. 



There is every reason for believing that Fuchsius' interest in 

 botany was* thus awakened. His earliest botanical publication 

 fully substantiates this view. It was issued by Brunfels as an ap- 

 pendix to the second volume of his Icones in 1531, that is, ten 

 or eleven years earlier than the appearing of his principal botanical 

 work. Its title translated is Leonard Fucks' Notes on certain Herbs 

 and Simples not yet rightly understood by the Physicians.^ It consists 

 of thirty-fottr long chapters upon more than as many plants and 

 plant products then in use ; dealing mainly with the right application 

 of ancient names; often quoting the language of authors whom he 



1 " Leonard! Fuchsii Annotationes aliquot Herbarum et Simplicium, a 

 Medicis hactenus non recte intellectorum." In Brunf. Icon., vol. ii, app., 

 pp. 129-155. 



