THE REVIVAL OF BOTANY 15 



research began to revive. Young naturalists, not only 

 from Italy itself, but from Germany, and now and then 

 one from England, came to Luke Ghini or to some 

 other Italian master to be trained in botany and 

 pharmacy. Pisa, Padua and Bologna had each its 

 botanic garden, and an academy of natural science was 

 founded in Naples. In Italy the new scientific move- 

 ment was soon quenched by the Church and the princes, 

 but the torch of learning had been handed to Germany, 

 and here it was not allowed to go out.^ 



Along the Rhine, from Switzerland to the Nether- 

 lands, civilisation and industry had long flourished 

 together. On the left bank of the river opulent towns 

 had been built even in Roman times. Centuries after 

 the fall of the empire, great trade-routes, connecting 

 Flanders and the Baltic with Lyons on the one hand 

 and Venice on the other, gave the merchants and 

 manufacturers of the Rhine access to the great markets 

 of the world. Here and in the country further to the 

 east had sprung up that powerful union of seventy 

 cities known in the thirteenth century as the Con- 

 federation of the Rhine ; here too in a later age were 

 found influential members of the Hanseatic League. 

 Printing and wood-engraving established themselves 

 in the fifteenth century at Mayence, Strasburg and 

 Cologne. When the Reformation began to stir, the 

 Rhineland, above the point where the river entered 

 the " priests' lane," and became enclosed by the arch- 

 bishoprics of Mayence, Treves and Cologne, contained 

 many sympathisers with Luther, who spread also east- 

 wards into Hesse and westwards into the Palatinate. 



^ Eurich Cordus and his son Valerius are among the Germans who visited 

 Italy in the early or middle part of the 16th century for botanical study. 

 The books of Italian writers on botany and pharmacy were often studied in 

 Germany about the same time. 



