June 30, 1910 55 



"The Greeks and Romans after Theoph'-astus," whose works 

 incidentally touched upon plants in one way or another, were 

 writers on rural topics, as Virgil and Columella; on medicine, 

 as the industrious Dioscorides and the traveled Galen, or that 

 first encyclopedist, the compiler, Pliny the elder. Great as were 

 the productions of these authors, and long as they held their 

 places of authority in the schools, botany received little or no 

 advancement at their hands. 



Now comes the decline of decaying Rome, and until the 

 revival of learning in the fifteenth century, botanical knowl- 

 edge, if botanical knowledge there were, is hidden in the murky 

 darkness that broods over the earth. Priceless parchments of 

 ancient learning are erased to afford a fair page for the engross- 

 ment of monastic fables. Perchance even yet Aristotle's lost 

 treatise may exist beneath the miraculous legend of a saint. 

 For thirteen troublous centuries no single Landmark emerges 

 from the gloom. 



Light dawns in Germany. Men shake off their torpor and 

 their dreams, and awaken to a new intellectual activity. A 

 group of botanists appear, and it is noteworthy that all are Luth- 

 erans, and all are physicians. The first of these "German Fath- 

 ers" of the revived science was Otto Brunsfels, of Mayence. In 

 1530 he brought out his Herbarium I'ivae Icones, "to give," as 

 he wrote, "a prop to fallen botany, to bring back to life a sci- 

 ence almost extinct." He was a Carthusian monk, who left his 

 monastery to devote himself to the support of the Reformation, 

 and he became a schoolmaster, later a physician, and the volu- 

 minous author of long-forgotten books of theology and of medi- 

 cine. To botany his only contribution were the Icoucs, folios 

 of good plant pictures, accompanied with a text compiled from 

 previous authors. His book, like those of his cotemporaries, 

 was designed to facilitate the identification of the many plants 

 of reported remideal virtues, which were the principal medicines 

 of the period. 



The great success of the Iconcs incited Leonhard Fusch to 

 undertake a similar work on a more extensive scale. Born at 

 Memmingen, in Bavaria, iu 1501, he received the best educ.i- 



