LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 227 



made use of them, were wellnigh superfluous, at least to all who 

 were competent to read the descriptions. No greate praise can 

 be given any man of that epoch, than will be rightfully accorded to 

 Tragus in adjudging him to be, for the whole era of modern botany, 

 the first father of phytography after Theophrastus. 



Anthology. It was now quite time that some one should 

 resume the investigation of floral structures; a part of botany in 

 respect to which no advancement had been made for fifteen cen- 

 turies. Neither Brunfels nor Fuchs had even so much knowledge 

 of them as had been attained to by Theophrastus eighteen centuries 

 before. The Greek had said concerning nut trees and oak trees 

 that, over and above those vermiform tassels whose use and nature 

 he could not explain, they have real flowers , things out of the very 

 heart of which nut and acorn were developed. Fuchsius, the 

 famous professor of medicine, physician to the titled and the 

 affluent, and moneyed employer of draftsmen and engravers to 

 figure plants, had boldly ventured the unwarranted opinion — 

 contradictory to that of the great Theophrastus — that the tassels of 

 oak and hazel take the place of flowers, and that such trees have 

 no other kind at all.^ 



Tragus, the poor schoolmaster, the apparently unlicensed country 

 doctor, the unordained preacher of the new evangel, welcomes this 

 kind of an opportunity to assail the errors of the dogmatists who 

 sit in exalted station; for, whatever else Tragus may or may not 

 be, he is a botanist well worthy of the name. The combined 

 botanical knowledge of all the Brunfelses and Fuchses of Germany 

 is but a small fraction of what he has seen and taken note of in the 

 book of nature. He has studied the hazel bushes both wild and 

 cultivated in their several species, from the time of the lengthening 

 of their aments in February, all through the spring, and the summer, 

 and the autumn. Theophrastus had averred that, whatever the 

 tassels might not be, the bush has flowers, demonstrably such 1 y 

 the fact that the fruits develop from them. Of the form and 

 coloring of such flowers, and the time of their appearing, he had 

 given no hint; and since at the period with which we are dealing, 

 quite as during two thousand years before, the first idea of a flower 

 was exactly our idea of a corolla, and none had ever seen such 

 things on hazel bushes at any time of year, it was not so wholly 

 inexcusable to deny that there were hazel flowers. And yet, the 

 most cursory reader of Theophrastus' chapters on flowers must have 

 :seen that he recognized flowers as either petaliferous or apetalous, 



' Fuchs, Hist. Stirp., p. 397. 



