THE HERBALISTS 13 



the morphology of flowers and of fruits, he makes no 

 use of them in arranging plants into groups. He had all 

 sorts of weird ideas on biological subjects ; for instance, 

 he thought that orchids had no seeds but arose from the 

 excreta of birds, while fungi were " merely the super- 

 fluous moisture of the earth and trees, of rotten wood, 

 and other rotten things." Abiogenesis and the trans- 

 mutation of one cereal into another, rejected by 

 Theophrastus as " fabulous/' are accepted by Bock as 

 truths. He had one good point to his credit, however, 

 viz. he described the wild plants of the countryside at 

 first hand. He alone of the three paternal herbalists is 

 entitled to the distinction of having gone direct to nature 

 for his information. 



" The tenor of the German writing of botanical 

 history," says Lee Greene, " is that the science of botany 

 was born again, as it were, in the year 1530 and in Germany, 

 by the publication of Otho Brunfelsius' folio entitled 

 Herbarum Vivae Icones Living Pictures of Herbs. The 

 Germans have always been and are the chief historians 

 of botany. . . . All of them name Brunfels, Fuchs, and 

 Tragus (Bock) as the fathers of the new botany of modern 

 times. It has been indicated in a previous chapter of 

 these Landmarks that the real father of botany as a 

 science was Theophrastus of Eresus. If he is the father 

 of the science he is the father of even modern botany, 

 though not of those developments of it that have been 

 the peculiar achievement of modern botanists. . . .' We shall 

 not be able to realise in how far the ' German Fathers ' 

 contributed to the superstructure of modern botany until 

 we have examined with great care and diligence their 

 best works ; and this is something which, I shall make 

 bold to say, not even the German historians have been 

 at the pains of doing ; though Sprengel, first of their 

 lineage, did much and well in this direction, while also 

 leaving very much for others to accomplish. Julius von 

 Sachs, the last in the line, copied Sprengel's caption 



