i8 HISTORY OF BOTANY 



greater care the wild flowers growing round him. Then 

 came, lastly, the youthful genius on whom the mantle 

 of the great Athenian had fallen, Valerius Cordus, and 

 so the science that had slept for eighteen centuries 

 reawakened to active hfe once more. 



In the thirty or forty years during which Brunfels, 

 Fuchs, Bock, and Cordus flourished we have only one 

 name of any note to boast of in the history of EngHsh 

 botany, namely that of William Turner. He was primarily 

 a collector of plants and travelled extensively over Europe 

 in quest of them. In 155 1 and succeeding years he 

 published a History of Plants of the usual herbal type, 

 the plants being arranged alphabetically. This work was 

 intended to replace the Hortus Sanitatis, a quaint produc- 

 tion full of absurdities, that had long served as the text- 

 book of medicine in England. 



I have already mentioned to you the name of Conrad 

 Gesner, the somewhat injudicious editor of Cordus's 

 Historia. He is best known by a work of his own 

 pubhshed in 1560, in which he treats much more fully of 

 flowers and fruits than did his predecessors. He seems 

 to have had some idea of what a genus meant, i.e. a 

 natural group of species, and he certainly recognised the 

 existence of varieties, for before acknowledging a species 

 as such he insisted on proof of its constancy. 



In the later years of the century two other treatises 

 made their appearance, the Rariorum Stirpium Historia 

 of Clusius, and the Stirpium Adversaria Nova of LobeHus. 

 The former work was pubhshed in its final form in 1601 

 and gives descriptions of plants then regarded as of 

 rare occurrence in Spain and in Austria-Hungary, while 

 the latter production, pubhshed in 1576, was somewhat 

 more ambitious and wider in its scope. LobeUus even 

 makes an attempt at classifying his plants into groups, 

 some of which, such as Cruciferae and Labiatae, are 

 recognised to this day. The central feature of his classi- 

 fication is the use he makes of the leaf. He begins 



