CHAPTER I. 



THE BOTANISTS OF GERMANY AND THE NETHERLANDS FROM 

 BRUNFELS TO KASPAR BAUHiN 1 . 



1530-1623. 



WHEN those who are accustomed to modern botanical litera- 

 ture take up for the first time the works of Otto Brunfels (1530), 

 Leonard Fuchs (1542), Hieronymus Bock (Tragus), or of the 

 later authors Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaus), Charles de 1'Ecluse 

 (Carolus Clusius), Matthias de 1'Obel (Lobelius, 1576), or 

 even those of Kaspar Bauhin from the beginning of the zyth 

 century, they are surprised not only by the strange form, 

 the curious and unfamiliar accessories from which what is 

 really useful must be laboriously extracted, but still more by 

 the extraordinary poverty of thought which characterises these 

 composers of usually very thick folios. If however instead of 

 travelling backwards from the present time they pursue the 

 opposite direction ; if they have previously occupied themselves 

 with the botanical views of Aristotle and the comprehensive 

 botanical works of his disciple Theophrastus of Eresus, with 

 Pliny's Natural History and the medical science of Dioscorides ; 



1 Kurt Sprengel in his 'Geschichte der Botanik,' i. 1817, and Ernst 

 Meyer in Ms ' Geschichte der Botanik,' iv. 1 857 have described the connection 

 between the first beginnings of modern botany and the general state of 

 learning in the ijth and i6th centuries; a particularly interesting notice of 

 Valerius Cordus from the pen of Thilo Irmisch will be found in the ' Prii- 

 fungsprogramm ' of the Schwarzburg gymnasium of Sondershausen for 1862. 

 Here, as throughout, the present work will be confined to the investigation 

 and description of the development of strictly botanical ideas. 



