THE HERBALISTS 15 



corides, an epitome of which, called Annotationes ad 

 Dioscoridem, appeared some years after his death. 



His pre-eminence, however, does not rest on his 

 Dispensary nor on his Lecture Notes ; it rests on the fact 

 that, as Haller puts it, he was " the first to teach men to 

 cease from dependence on the poor descriptions of the 

 ancients and to describe plants anew from Nature." 

 During his residence at Wittenberg he appears to have 

 explored the forests and wild mountain glens of the 

 Erzgebirge, the Fichtelgebirge, and the Riesengebirge, 

 and to have made several hundred new discoveries, 

 surely no mean achievement for a youth scarcely out of 

 his teens, with nothing to aid him in his search save a 

 rehash of Dioscorides or Galen. As a result of these 

 wanderings among his native mountains he wrote a 

 Historia Plantarum when he was twenty-five years old, 

 in which he described between four and five hundred 

 species ; but, in order to perfect his book before giving 

 it to the printer, he went a pilgrimage through the Univer- 

 sities of Italy Padua, Ferrara, Pisa, Bologna, Florence, 

 Lucca, and finally Rome, where he fell ill of malaria and 

 died in the 2Qth year of his age. His epitaph in the 

 church of S. Maria de Anima includes the following 

 lines : 



Ingenio su perest Cordus : mens ipsa recepta est coelo : 

 Quod terrae est, maxima Roma tenet. 



The task of an editor of a posthumous work is never 

 an easy one, but his duty would appear to be to try and 

 visualise the form the publication would have taken had 

 the author lived to guide its passage through the press, 

 rather than to alter the original text or mode of presenta- 

 tion to bring them more into conformity with his own 

 conceptions. Cordus's Historia was not published until 

 1561, seventeen years after his death, the MS. having 

 been placed in the hands of Conrad Gesner. One of 

 Cordus's chief aims had been to describe the plants he 

 had found in such a way that plates might be dispensed 



