CHAPTER IV 



INTRODUCTORY TO THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN 



FATHERS 



That long course of ages intervening between the last decline 

 of the Roman empire and the revival of learning in the fifteenth 

 century is chiefly distinguished botanically by what we do not know 

 about it. Even the historians of botany, with hardly more than a 

 single exception,^ instead of making intelligent and unimpassioned 

 use of the scattered fragments of botanical record for the period, 

 have done what they could to perpetuate their own hereditary 

 prejudices against the whole period. ^ 



However, he who is in quest of landmarks chiefly will be absolved 

 from the task, interesting though that would be, of following the 

 vicissitudes of botany through the middle ages. The period has 

 not apparent landmarks of botanical history. 



The tenor of the German writing of its history is, that the science 

 of botany was born again, as it were, in the year 1530 and in 

 Germany, by the publication of Otho Brunfelsius' folio entitled 

 Herbarum- Vivce I cones — Living Pictures of Herbs. The Germans 

 have always been and are the chief historians of botany. I pay 

 full tribute of acknowledgment to their supremacy in this field of 

 high endeavor when for the heading of this chapter I adopt what 

 is become their own favorite caption. All of them use it: Kurt 



» Meyer alone {Geschichte der Botanik, vols, iii and iv) has trea.ted the 

 subject of botany in the middle ages with impartiality. 



' Emphatic examples of this kind of writing in the name of history are 

 in Sprengel's Historia Ret Herbarias, vol. i; particularly his chapter on 

 "Monastic Botany," pp. 222-228, and on the " Latinobarbarous Age," 

 pp. 274-299; wherein even concerning the botanical volume of Albertus 

 Magnus he says, "Let him read it who has time to throw away"; though 

 Meyer, only a half-century after Sprengel, and as much an antimonachist 

 as he, devotes seventy serious pages of his history to the merits of this 

 same Albertus of the middle ages. 



165 



