THE HERBALISTS ii 



genius's life is of great interest, and his contributions to 

 the science of botany are recognised as fundamental by 

 men like Tournefort and Haller, although he and his 

 works together are dismissed by Sachs in less than a line, 

 as "of no importance." 



In the Introduction to his History, Sachs tells us that 

 " the first German composers of Herbals went straight 

 to nature, described the wild plants growing round them 

 and had figures of them carefully executed in wood." 

 This is quite incorrect. Three of these sixteenth-century 

 herbahsts were Brunfels, Fuchs, and Bock. The first of 

 them, by profession a Carthusian monk, expressly states 

 that he described none of the plants he figures at first 

 hand. " In this whole work," he writes, " I have no 

 other end in view than that of giving a prop to fallen 

 botany ; to bring back to Hfe a science almost extinct. 

 And because this has seemed to me to be in no other 

 way possible than by thrusting aside all the old herbals, 

 and pubhshing new and really fife-like engravings, and 

 along with them accurate descriptions extracted from 

 ancient and trustworthy authors, I have attempted both, 

 using the greatest care and pains that both shall be 

 faithfully done." The book is illustrated by about three 

 hundred figures of variable degree of excellence ; un- 

 fortunately, however, Brunfels, despite his protestations, 

 was not always at pains to see that the description and 

 the figure agreed. Lee Greene, who has made a special 

 study of the texts of the sixteenth-century writers, tells us 

 that " the Brunfelsian volumes are a treasury of select 

 quotations from a long fine of books, many of which are 

 now seldom seen. But there are no new descriptions in his 

 volumes ; and it may be doubted whether upon the 

 whole he advanced the art of plant description by a 

 syllable." Brunfels's Herhal was pubHshed in Latin 

 about the year 1530. He adopts the ancient classifica- 

 tion of plants into woody and herbaceous, and rejects the 

 alphabetical sequence of genera in favour of an association 



