CHAPTER VIII 

 EURICIUS CORDUS, 1486-1535 



ONE of the most gifted and scholarly men among all who figured 

 in German botany in the early sixteenth century is Euicius rCordus 

 who, though a cultivator of plants, and also a zealous field botanist, 

 wrote no great book, and is chiefly interesting here as having been 

 the father and the educator of that most brilliant of early German 

 botanists, Valerius Cordus. 



Life. Henricus the name was altered by himself in his school 

 days to Euricius was the thirteenth child of a pair of honest and 

 worthy Hessian peasants, and was born at Siemershausen in the 

 year 1486. His parents died when he was a child, and in some way 

 he became for a time the inmate of a collegiate school at Franken- 

 berg. Here he formed a strong and lasting attachment to a youth, 

 his junior by two years, who afterwards under the adopted name 

 of Helius Eobanus Hessus became celebrated as a philologist and 

 as one of the most elegant Latin writers of the period. On account 

 of a treatise upon dietetics favoring vegetable foods, 1 which in its 

 day was well received and passed through several editions, Haller 

 has enrolled the name of this Eobanus Hessus in his list of botanical 

 authors. What influence he had upon botany was more indirect. 

 It was evidently by virtue of this strong attachment between 

 Hessus and Cordus that the latter was brought finally to devote 

 himself to intellectual pursuits. 



After those first school days at Frankenberg, and while Cordus 

 was very young, he married and was settled at his native Siemers- 

 hausen; in what occupation no records tell; but when in the year 

 1515 a son was born to him, the event appears to have stimulated 

 him to renewed endeavors to attain distinction in scholarship ; for 

 before the son was two years old Euricius Cordus had won the 

 Master's degree at the university of Erfurth; his special studies 



1 " Praecepta bonae valetudinis conservandae " is the title of this treatise 

 according to Haller, Bibliotheca Botanica, vol. i, p. 260. 



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