3IO SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



with those minute drops that have the appearance of dew. He 

 has done what was in his power to ascertain at least the qualities 

 of those minute glistening drops. He has tasted, and reports 

 the flavor to be a little bitterish, with also a hint of the acidulous, 

 and slightly acrid. 



The plant physiologist of to-day, interested in the functions of 

 the root tubercles of leguminous plants may find in Valerius Cor- 

 dus the earliest mention of these organs. I do not find him taking 

 note of them except as occurring in the cultivated lupine of Europe. 

 Accustomed to give a full account of every kind of root, even to its 

 medicinal usefulness or uselessness, he says of that of the lupine that 

 it is "slender, woody, white and without useful properties, parted 

 into a few slender fibres upon which there sometimes grow small 

 tubercles."^ 



Ecology. We have already been learning that even from the 

 most primitive times every botanist was an ecologist; at least to 

 the extent of observing and recording the special environment which 

 every kind of wild plant afifects, and sometimes to the mentioning 

 of some of its associate species. Valerius Cordus, being well 

 skilled in both chemistry and mineralogy, goes beyond all his pre- 

 decessors in that he names the petrography of a plants' habitat, 

 or otherwise indicates the constituency of the soil in which it is to 

 be looked for. We can in no other way so well present this, his 

 own new aspect of matters ecological, than by the translation of a 

 few of his passages. 



The fern called hart's tongue, best known as Scolopendrium, but 

 which Cordus knew as Phyllitis, he says, "grows on shaded and 

 rocky declivities of mountains ; loves a rich soil, though not springing 

 from the soil directly, but from the moss that covers the rocks, 

 especially limestone."^ 



To Saxijraga Aizoon he attributes the habitat of "Limestone 

 cliffs, especially where they are wet and overgrown with moss. "^ 



Describing two species of Sanguisorba, that which he calls 5. 

 major "inhabits low clayey pasture lands that are subject to in- 

 undation from rivers," while S. minor also "grows in clayey soil, 

 or even gravelly, but on open sunny slopes and along roadsides. "^ 



He seems to take a special interest in the ecology of such plants 

 as he has himself first discovered and described as new. The 



> Hist. PL, p. 137. 



2 Ibid., p. 113. 



3 Ibid., p. 92. 



« Ibid., p. 144. 



