LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 167 



identification of remedies more easy and certain by supplying 

 engravings of the plants. This idea was very far from being 

 new; indeed, it was almost as old as botany. Pliny knew as many 

 as three Greek authors who, before the Christian era, had illustrated 

 their manuscripts by paintings of the plants.^ The traditions of 

 still others have been brought to light. In the middle ages early and 

 late rare manuscripts of old botanical authors illustrated by draw- 

 ings or paintings of plants were known and referred to. The most 

 noted of such ancient manuscripts, now some thirteen centuries old, 

 has been reproduced photographically, and in this way actually pub- 

 lished since the beginning of the twentieth century. ^ Even forty or 

 fifty years before these fathers of plant iconography, there were 

 printed copies of the Hortus Sanitatis,^ and of its German version, 

 Gart der Gesundheit, illustrated by some five hundred wood engrav- 

 ings of plants. Doubtless the wretched character of those first 

 printed plant pictures, along with the fact of the great popularity of 

 the books containing them, were what moved Brunfels to undertake 

 the production of the Herbarum ''^ivcs I cones; and the success 

 of his enterprise stimulated Fuchs to inaugurate a larger one. 

 These two might worthily have been styled Fathers of Plant 

 Iconography, but to name them the German Fathers of Botany 

 is superlative ; for it will have to be admitted that the mere publish- 

 ing of plates of plants, with names of said plants and their uses, 

 is not in itself the setting forth of any scientific principles beyond 

 the few taxonomic ideas which the mere grouping of the plates 

 may chance to indicate. What are plant picture-books for? In 

 the case of the authors of them, they may be the refuge of those 

 who can not describe, or, with such as can describe, they are 

 a condescension to such as can not read; also to others who are 



> Plin., Hist. Nat., Book xxv, ch. 2; see also Meyer, Geschichte, vol. i, 250. 

 The names of the ancient painters were Cratevas, Dionysius, and Metrodorus. 



2 A celebrated Greek manuscript of the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, 

 known as the Codex Anicics Juliancs, in which each plant is represented by 

 a painting of natural size. The manuscript dates from the sixth century 

 and was done at Constantinople. It has long been in the Imperial Library 

 at Vienna. The whole has lately been reproduced photographically. The 

 title page of the published work has the following: 



" Dioscurides. Codex Anicias Julianae picturis illustratus, nunc Vindo- 

 bonensis Med. Gr. I. photographice editus. Moderante J. Karabacek. Pre- 

 fati sunt A. de Premerstein, C. Wessely, J. Mantuani. Lugduni Bata- 

 vorum, A. W. Sijthoff, 1906." 



3 For some account of these earliest specimens of printed books of popular 

 medicine chiefly botanical, the reader is referred to Pritzel's Thesaurus, 

 ad ed., pp. 364-368; also Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. iv, p. 189. 



