l68 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



incapable of mentally imaging a thing from the verbal description 

 of it. By the large picture-books of Brunfels and of Fuchs all 

 sorts and conditions of men, lettered and illiterate, could identify 

 some hundreds of useful plants ; a thing which never had happened 

 in the world before that day. For this they deserve only praise. 

 Nevertheless, had no books of botany been issued in the sixteenth 

 century essentially difEerent from those of the two authors named, 

 it is difficult to see how botany could have progressed a single stage 

 within that century. 



In the works of Tragus and of Valerius Cordus we have books 

 in character essentially different from those of the two aforenamed. 

 Both these were deeply interested in plants of all kinds; were given 

 to examining their organs minutely and marking the behavior of 

 certain growths at different stages, and all this before ever having 

 thought of writing books thereon. Also when they betook themselves 

 to writing it was without any purpose of calling upon artists to 

 make pictures remedying the defects of their descriptions. They 

 were under the inspiration of a new idea in botany, namely, 

 that plants might be so described as to be identifiable by description. 

 Galen's dream about a kind of apostolic succession of living teachers, 

 one generation of whom should forever teach the next to know the 

 medicinal plants by their right names^ — all that had proven a very 

 idle dream. Thirteen changeful, turbulent centuries had now 

 passed since Galen. The succession had been obsolete a thousand 

 years, and the world botanical was far at sea as to the true identity 

 of many important plants. There must be descriptions; and they 

 must be better than those handed down from ancient times. I should 

 not venture to credit the erratic and garrulous Tragus with having 

 known the history of botany so well, or having planned the opening 

 of a new era in descriptive botany. We shall probably see, by 

 the perusal of his book, that what he achieved here, and it was 

 not a little, was but the spontaneous outcome of his admiring 

 curiosity about plant structures. On Cordus' part, it is un- 

 mistakable, there is the deliberate plan of creating a new phy- 

 tography. Therefore, and by a study of the men and their books, 

 I think we shall perceive that in the Germany of the first half of 

 the sixteenth century, there were two fathers of plant iconography 

 and two fathers of descriptive botany. 



' See page 165 preceding. 



