174 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



the roots of the fumariaceous perennials, not so unlike those of the 

 principal aristolochia, had usurped in medicine both their place and 

 their name. Brunfels, though professedly reforming German 

 pharmacy by the correcting of just such blunders, did not detect 

 this one Yet the very descriptions of aristolochia which he re- 

 prints from Dioscorides and Pliny must have shown, had he really 

 read them, that these things could not be aristolochias. Other 

 such errors also remained undiscovered by him, and as inexcusably; 

 so that when his countryman and contemporary Fuchs remarked 

 that in Brunfels the descriptions and the plates accompanying 

 them are not in all cases at agreement,^ he was passing but a gentle 

 criticism on his neighbor's phytographical shortcomings. 



Anthology. I have met with no evidence that during the fifteen 

 centuries intervening between Dioscorides and Brunfels there had 

 been any progress made in the knowledge and understanding of 

 floral structures. There were several of Brunfels' younger con- 

 temporaries who, after the year 1530, added somewhat to anthology; 

 but the time was yet more than two generations distant when the 

 science of the flower was to become so far developed as to begin 

 happily to revolutionize plant classification. There is no sign in 

 Brunfels that such a day is near its dawning. In his attempts to 

 range plants in groups he is no more influenced by considerations 

 of floral structure than were the medical botanists of remote anti- 

 quity; even less so than Dioscorides, who, as we shall see, could not 

 abide the placement of the bilabiate-flowered dead nettles in the 

 same genus with real nettles, but segregated them, on account of 

 their two-lipped corollas, and assigned them a new generic name of 

 their own, and framed to express the peculiarity of their flowers. 

 It is possible to rate the Brunfelsian anthology as more antiquated 

 and imperfect than that of Dioscorides ; for he of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury less openly recognizes as generically distinct the Galeopsis and 

 Lamium "nettles" and the proper Urtica^; and if he figures the 

 thistles, the anthemideous composites, the principal borragineous 

 plants, the bulk of the labiates, and some other such, each as a 

 group by itself, it is done without any particular reference to floral 

 structure, at least on Brunfels' part; for in all these instances he is 

 but continuing groupings which the ancients themselves had indi- 

 cated as being natural, and had well established. 



Taxonomy. Brunfels adopts without hesitancy the ancient pri- 

 mary classification of growths as herbaceous and woody. When, 



• Epistle Dedicatory, in Fuchsius Hist. Stirpium. 

 ' Herbarum VivcB Icones, vol. i, pp. 1 51-154. 



