LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 2/ I 



save mention of the fact of his having observed the sensitivity of 

 certain leaves.' 



Such conflict of opinion on the part of nineteenth-century 

 writers has seemed to make it incumbent on me to determine if 

 possible, out of Cordus' writings themselves, why it was that for 

 nearly two centuries before the nineteenth he was held in such 

 esteem by accomplished botanists of every nationality in Europe. 



Life. Valerius Cordus was bom in the year 151 5 at Siemers- 

 hausen, where also his father Euricius Cordus had been bom. 

 There is a beauty and a certain pathos in the story of how the 

 destined father while a boy had made fine progress on the road to 

 higher learning, and then by an early marriage, evidently in poverty, 

 seemed to have extinguished all hope of a scholar's career. Yet 

 when this son was born, the young father's zeal for learning 

 returned ; for to the child there must be given every advantage of 

 high education ; and he himself would be the educatoi of his Valerius. 

 In some way he managed, as we have already seen, to go to the 

 university of Erfurth, where he very soon obtained his first aca- 

 demic degree. Thenceforward he supported his family by teaching 

 and lecturing until other degrees had been gained, and he was 

 settled in the profession of medicine; meanwhile training his boy 

 carefully in the ancient languages, philosophy, and the sciences, 

 among them botany in particular. We have a biographer's 

 testimony to this. "Valerius Cordus was imbued with an incredible 

 zeal for learning thoroughly not only medicine, but also the right 

 recognition of plants, to which latter his father Euricius, a physician 

 and also an illustrious poet, urged him by both precept and 

 example ; for he had reared the child even from the cradle in the 

 midst of herbs and flowers. "^ 



Cordus took his degree in medicine at the univers ty of Wittem- 

 berg, and there shortly after gave regular lectures on Dioscorides. 

 and with such marked acceptance that to the audience of medical 

 students certain professors joined themselves.^ It must have been 

 earlier than this that he prepared his Dispensatorium, or manner of 

 preparing all medicines, the only work of his that was printed in 

 his lifetime, and which was a great success. He had not even 

 intended it for publication, but appears to have written it as a pas, 

 time while with his uncle, Joachim Ralla, an apothecary at Leipzig. 



' Sachs, Geschichte, p. 579. 



' Walter Riffius in Preface to first edition of Cordus Annotations on Dios- 

 corides, Frankfurt, 1549; also to Strasburg ed. of Cordus' works, 1561. 

 s Meyer, Geschichte, vol. iv, p. 317. 



