56 Muhlenbergia, Volume 6 



lion the German schools could bestow, and became a celebrated 

 physician, and a popular university lecturer on medicine. His 

 interest in botany appears to have been connected with these 

 professional pursuits. He employed two painters and the best 

 engraver in Strassburg, and by their assistance published a great 

 volume entitled HiUoria Stirpium, containing 512 large plates, 

 whereas Fusch had figured but 135 plants. The text has little 

 that is original, but in the "Explanation of Difficult Terms" we 

 have the first botanical vocabulary. In it appear such familiar 

 terms as "scape," "decussate," and "verticillate," as applied to 

 leaves, and "calyx," which he defines as a "bag within which 

 first the flower, and after that the seeds, are enclosed." 



Perhaps Brunfels rendered his greatest service to botany 

 when he visited Jerome Bock at Hornbeck, and encouraged him 

 to publish the results of his botanical studies. Bock is better 

 known under the name of Tragus, but of his life few particulars 

 have reached us. He was born near Heidelberg, in 1498, and 

 became a preacher and a distinguished physician. With him 

 botany was a real love of plants for themselves, and not for 

 their utilities. The others wrote in Latin, he in German; they 

 copied the classic accounts to accompany their pictures, he stud- 

 ied and knew plants, and described them himself, and as he had 

 no aid from figures, his descriptions must needs be as accurate 

 as he could make them. His "Kneues Krauterbuch" was, there- 

 for, more original than the fine picture books of the others. He 

 follows the established system of phytography, whereby plants 

 were grouped solely on vegetative characters, a method produc- 

 tive of what are to us very incongruous assemblages. But he 

 investigates the neglected flower, and recognizes seven forms of 

 the corolla; he sees that .stamens have two parts, the "capilla- 

 inentum" and the- "apex;" he counts them, and finds that their 

 number is definite, but different in different species of plants. 

 They are not ,1 mere vague "tuft of hairs," as others had called 



11 He even had sonic notion of what he was the first to 



call the "pistil." These \\< re wonderful advances in antholi gy, 



only he did not in the least realize their importance, and had 



1 inkling of tin- significance of these organs. He 



