LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE I 71 



to school teaching only after his voice had failed him, so that he 

 could no longer preach. Here again the historian Meyer draws 

 an inference. It is this, that his school must have been a financial 

 success, because at the end of nine years at teaching he had saved 

 money enough to pay the expenses of his degree at the University 

 of Basle. Without doubting the financial success of Brunfels' school 

 it is next to certain that he realized a much more considerable 

 income from the sale of his rather voluminous Protestant theological 

 writings ; for these included, besides learned commentaries on certain 

 books of Scripture, pamphlets for popular reading, and a catechism 

 for children. There is a long list of them in Conrad Gesner's Biblio- 

 theca Universalis. Altogether his two vocations of teacher and 

 theological author must have yielded him a very fair income 

 during these first nine years at Strassburg; for he was able to give 

 employment to the best engraver of Strassburg, Hans Weydiz 

 (Latinized Guiditius) , who did the engraving of the Icones, and is 

 a man of distinction in the history of wood engraving. 



It must have been after having taken his degree in medicine, 

 and within two or three years from the time of his death, that 

 Brunfels made a journey from Strassburg to Hornbach for the 

 purpose of personally urging Jerome Bock (Tragus) to write a book 

 of botany for German readers. For the record of this visit history 

 is indebted to Tragus himself. In the thirteenth chapter of his 

 preface to the Stirpium Historia he says: "When information 

 about the labors and the journeyings which I had undergone in 

 behalf of plants had in some way been conveyed to the most learned 

 Otto Brunfels of pious memory, he himself came journeying all 

 the way from Strassburg to Hornbach, that he might see my gardens 

 and collections. These things pleased him so much that from that 

 day forward he ceased not to exhort, as did also others by letter, 

 that I would reduce all this matter to order, and give it to the 

 German public." 



Not one of even the compatriot German historians of botany, in so 

 far as I am aware, has set before us this evidence that it was to 

 Brunfels' personal influence over Tragus that the writing and 

 publishing of Tragus' w^ork was due. How much botany owes to 

 Tragus' unusual powers of observation and description we shall 

 learn later; for the half of that story has never yet been told. 



It is well worth noting that this visit to Tragus, with its fruitful 

 consequences, was the last service which Brunfels rendered to 

 botany. The visit must have been made as late as the year 1532; 

 for not until that year was Tragus settled at Hornbach ; and in the 



