ae NG eR Oy eg ME Utes hg) ho 
f Ee ae = 3 
192 Aster History; RHABANUS 
chief writer during Charlemagne’s reign to pay considerable atten- 
tion to Nature. His extensive work, De Universo, was the labor 
of his youth, written while in the cloister at Fulda, completed 
when about 29, in 803, and consisting of 22 books, modelled upon 
the work of Isidorus Hispalensis. In it he mentions about 100 
plants, giving their etymologies, properties and products, but 
with more attention to “their symbolic or spiritual meaning” than 
to their actual characters. 
XXXVII. Watrarrip STRABUS 
-Walafrid Strabus * or Strabus Fuldensis, 807-849, a Suabian 
the mouth of the Main, was successively a Celtic town, a Roman camp, the Roman 
capital of Germania Superior, and the head of the mediaeval league of Rhenish towns- 
Here in 840 on an island in the Rhine, died Louis le Debonnaire, le Pieux, at the age 
of 72, son and successor of Charlemagne. Here in 843 at the treaty of Verdun (the 
foundation of the German Kingdom), in the partition then made of the empire of Charle- 
magne, the line of Germany which usually followed the Rhine, was swerved to the west 
so as to include Mentz in the territories of Louis the German. Here its archbishop 
Hatto I. conducted the government of Germany during the reign of Louis the Child, 
goo-91t. Here in 913, Bishop Hatto died, to be flung by the devil, says German 
legend, into the crater of Etna for his crimes. Here in 968 another ill-fated Hatto be- 
came bishop, builder of the ‘‘ Mouse-tower,”’ to be eaten alive there, says the legend, 
in the following year. Here, soon after the invention of printing, were the first dated 
issues from the press of those curious compends of botanical Jegend, he Ortus Sanitatis, 
cathegeta, peritam sophistam enutristri ;’’ “7. e., Master Walhafred is very well know? 
to you, whom yo. yourself, as skilled guide, nourished and developed into 4 skilled 
master of learning.’’ Walafrid ictine n 
chenau, the Latin Augia, an island (now in Baden) 5 miles from Constance, 
Untersee of Lake Constance; this abbey, founded about 728, was secularized 1803- 
Here Walafrid read, in 825, at the age of 18, wrote his Vision of the monk Wetinus 
(Wettin), dedicating his poem to Grimoald and mentioning his instructors Rhabanus, 
and Tatto the monk of Reichenau. At Reichenau or before, Walafrid had adopted 
the name Strabus, saying of himself in a poem to Grimoald 
Edidit haec Strabus, parvissima portio fratrum, 
ugiae quos vestris insula alit precibus. 
Strabonem quamquam dicendum regula clamet, 
trabum me ipse volo dicere ; Strabus ero. 
poe Oe Ce, RES teem 
