272 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



But the uncle thought so highly of the manuscript that he placed it 

 before the magistracy of the city of Nuremberg, and they ordered 

 it printed. 1 It was first published in 1535, was often reprinted 

 during the next 150 years, and was even translated out of the 

 original Latin into French. 2 



The Annotations on Dioscorides, being a kind of abstract of 

 his Wittemberg lectures, were not published until five years after 

 his death, and were never by Cordus himself prepared for the press; 

 perhaps not even so much as once written down by him at any 

 time ; for the printer's copy, when it came to the printing, consisted 

 of the notes of a student who had been his auditor, whose note 

 book was found available. 3 



In this kind of work young Cordus is before us in but the ordinary 

 role of the early sixteenth-century botanical scholar, a master of the 

 ancient languages, delving deeply into the medico-botanical works 

 of Greek and Roman antiquity, and laboring to correct, amend, and 

 in some degree perhaps augment the ancient pharmacopeia. To 

 have been able to accomplish so much in this direction, and that 

 while yet hardly having attained to manhood, was in itself a proof 

 of genius. To understand the exalted character of this genius it is 

 only necessary to canvass what the youth had also attained to along 

 other and different lines at the same time. 



In field work in Germany, for botany alone not to speak of 

 geology and mineralogy, in both of which he was, for his time, an 

 expert he had wrought out more results that had his older con- 

 temporaries, Brunfelsius, Tragus, and Fuchsius combined. In his 

 repeated journeyings to the great forests and wildest mountain 

 districts, it is estimated that he discovered several hundred new 

 plants. 4 Sprengel has given the Linnaean names of some twenty- 

 five of these new discoveries of Cordus ; and that is perhaps double 

 or treble the number of novelties gathered in by the whole three 

 above named ; and they both were men of longer life and more or 

 less extensive travel. At the time when Cordus' field studies of 

 German botany were in progress nothing had ever been published 

 bearing on Germany in particular as to its plants. The investiga- 

 tor of the botany of its forests, fields, and mountains had no other 

 descriptive resources than the folios of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, 

 and Pliny. Even Brunfelsius' book, which had appeared when 



Meyer, Geschichte, p. 318. 



' Haller. Bibliotheca Botanica. vol. i, p. 282. 



' Meyer, Geschichte, vol. iv, p. 318. 



* Haller, Bibliotheca Botanica, vol. i, p. 281. 



