398 AsTER History: DODOENS 
Aster Atticus among its medical plants, with the virtues ascribed 
to it by the ancients. So tenacious has been the hold of Dios- 
corides upon the race. 
CLUSIUS AND HIS COUNTRYMEN 
LXXXVI. DopoENs 
Rembert Dodoens or Dodonaeus Mechliniensis,—oldest of the 
three Antwerp botanists, friends and collaborators, Dodoens, 
Clusius and Lobel,—was born in 1517 at Malines (Mecheln or 
Mechlin) where his father Dodo Dodoens, a Frieslander born, was 
a merchant. Early a student of the University of Louvain, he 
was licensed in medicine in his 18th year ; in 1535-1546 he sought 
broader education in medicine in many German, French and Italian 
universities, and finally at Basle ; in 1548 was made city physician 
of Malines; wrote this year his “ /sagoge cosmographica,” and 
began to write in Flemish the History of Plants or Cruydeboeck 
which occupied most of the rest of his life. Later he was physi- 
cian to King Philip II at Madrid, in 1574 to Maximilian II at 
Vienna, 1576-9 to his successor at Vienna, Rudolf II; there 
meeting with his friend and fellow-countrymen, Clusius, who was 
in charge, about 1573, of the Royal Garden; and with his old 
colleague, the famed physician, Crato von Kraftheim, with whom 
he became unfortunately drawn into controversy. 
Returningin 1582 to his native Malines, just then plundered 
a second time by Spanish troops, he accepted a medical profes- 
sorship at Leyden; he published the following year at Ant- 
werp his botanical masterpiece, his Pemptades, and died in 1586, 
aged 68. Meyer remarks of him that in his works we find the 
first flora of the Netherlands; and that he marks an advance 
toward a classification of plants, of which he himself says in his 
Pemptades, “de ordine non exigua accessit solicitudo.’’ But the 
conclusion of Dodoens was that Dioscorides’ plan was still the 
most practicable, to class according to properties, and only secon- 
darily according to form. 
Dodoens’ Cruydeboeck,* his famous Flemish herbal, begun in 
* The 4th book of the Cruydeboeck was the first to be printed, 1552, by the name of 
De frugum historia, with figures mostly from Fuchs. Figures for the first three books fol- 
