THE OLD AND THE NEw LEARNING 331 
how he exercised himself in the botany of antiquity, and how he 
showed himself but a “ rudis homo literarum” in making many a 
“ridiculum plane errorem”’ about the identification of Arabic and 
Hebrew names of plants. But these mistakes of that period were 
the stepping-stones on which rose the knowledge of the next. 
Meyer ignores him almost entirely. Brunfels calls him “ zodi/is,’” 
meaning of a noble family (expatriated from Salerno ?) and 
“ expertmentator,” alluding to his efforts to distil medicinal or 
other waters from a great range of plants; and usually simply 
Herbarius, “the herbalist.” Perhaps no other among the many 
plant-workers of the Renaissance time united so fully the old and 
the new attitudes toward nature ; like the old, he was continually 
copying the remarks of the ancients on properties : like the new, 
he was himself wandering in the fields to get a knowledge of 
plants at first hand. Though using Latin, he was fond of the 
vernacular, wrote in it and recorded the names that he heard from 
the lips of the people. Though submitting the properties of plants 
to the scientific test of the retorts in his laboratory, he was still 
of the age of Ponce de Leon who believed in a fountain of youth ; 
there were plants which Hieronymus believed could confer the 
gift of beauty; and he remarks of the fumitory-vine, that “ Fu- 
mariae potio. . .pulchritudinem inducit.”’ * 
Hieronymus’ Distillerung Buch.—Hieronymus’ best-known 
work, his “ Zider de arte distillandii—von der Kunst der distil- 
lerung,” Strasburg, 1500, is a folio with 212 leaves and over 200 
figures of plants, among which one, the widely distributed 
Gentiana cruciata of the European continent, was here figured for 
the first time, fide Sprengel. 
The Distillerung Buch has, remarks Sprengel (Geschichte, 1: 
295), almost the same plant descriptions and the same figures as 
inthe Ortus Sanitatis ; 7. e., nearly the same as far as they go, the 
woodcuts numbering only 238, fide Pritzel.t 
Wie oe 
* Quoted by Brunfels, 1: 102 
: aoe oa i in innumerable 
This “ Distitlerung Buch”? as it was often termed, was reissued 
Waters of all maner of herbes.’? Important German editions which followed later w 
those of Egenolph, Frankfort, 1533, bound together wi 
“Ppeared, Southwark, 1525, under the title ‘* The vertuose boke of Distyliacyon of the 
be 
th the enlarged Ortus Sanitatis 
