264 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



having been the ancient languages and philology, the same which 

 his particular friend Eob nus Hessus had been all the while 

 pursuing. The year following, i.e. 15 17, we find him a student 

 at Leipzig, where also he gives lectures on pastoral poems in Latin 

 of which he is himself the author. Here also he makes a lasting 

 friendship with the young Joachim Camerarius — father of the 

 botanist of that same name — a much younger man than Cordus, 

 and at the time a student at Leipzig, and who subsequently became 

 distinguished in philology. Camerarius soon removed to Erfurth, 

 and Cordus returned thither with him. Eobanus Hessus was still 

 there, and the three determined to open there a select school of 

 their own. That Cordus' lectures and poems had already earned 

 for him a reputation is evinced by this, that his opening a seminary 

 of learning brought him a letter of congratulation and good counsel 

 from so great a celebrity as Desiderius Erasmus. 



The time at which this new school enterprise was undertaken 

 proved inopportune; a time when, in Germany, even the oldest and 

 most renowned seats of learning were realizing the influences 

 of that ecclesiastical and civil upheaval commonly called the 

 Reformation; and Cordus and his companions closed their school 

 in the year 1521, And now, as if in hope of thereby gaining a 

 better, or at lea:st a surer, living for himself and his family, he entered 

 the medical profession. Without the means of journeying to 

 Italy and maintaining a year's residence at the most celebrated 

 school of medicine in Europe, that of Ferrara, a physician at 

 Erfurth, one Doctor Sturtius.^ offered him financial aid; and at 

 Ferrara, in 1522, Cordus received the Doctorate in Medicine at the 

 hands of the venerable Leonicenus then 94 years of age and still 

 active in the discharge of his professorial duties. 



Returning now to Erfurth, Cordus practiced medicine during four 

 or five years, and then in 1527 accepted an appointment to the 

 chair of medicine in the newly founded Protestant university at 

 Marburg; from which movement the historians infer, and not un- 

 reasonably, that Cordus had abandoned the Catholic faith and 

 become a Lutheran In this new position he found leisure for 

 study and authorship, for he translated into Latin verse both the 

 Alexipharmaca and the Theriaca of Nicander. both published by 

 Egenolph of Frankfort, in 1532. Here also his own Latin pastoral 

 poems were published, but without date, or name of publisher. 

 Here also he wrote and gave to the public his one botanical work, the 



• Winckler, Geschichte der Botanik, p. 76. 



