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Brunfels and Fuchs were concerned almost wholly with medical 

 botany. They both illustrated their principal works copiously 

 with the idea of improving upon certain other plant illustrations 

 then in vogue and with the intention of facilitating the identifica- 

 tion of plants used in medicine. Their descriptions were copied 

 or compiled from Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, and 

 other ancient writers, with occasional annotations and discussions 

 of their own. The works of Brunfels and of Fuchs enjoyed great 

 popularity, but Dr. Greene considers it "superlative" to include 

 these two worthies among the "German Fathers of Botany", 

 though some such title as "Fathers of Plant Iconography" might 

 fittingly be bestowed upon them. But the works of Tragus and 

 of Valerius Cordus were of another character, and these twc 

 authors may justly be called the "Fathers of Descriptive Botany". 

 "Both these were deeply interested in plants of all kinds; were 

 given to examining their organs minutely and marking the be- 

 havior of certain growths at different stages, and all this before 

 even having thought of writing books thereon. . , . They were 

 under an inspiration of a new idea in botany, namely, that plants 

 might be so described as to be identified by description." 



Euricius Cordus is chiefly interesting "as having been the 

 father and educator of that most brilliant of early German 

 botanists, Valerius Cordus." However, he wrote a booklet, the 

 "Botanologicon", in which he exposed the folly and danger of 

 trying to make the descriptions of Grecian medicinal plants 

 always fit the plants that are native in Germany. Valerius 

 Cordus, who died of a fever in Rome at the early age of 29 years, 

 has been characterized by the historian Meyer as "a splendid and 

 all too transitory phenomenon." The chief work of Valerius 

 Cordus, entitled "Historia Plantarum", was not published until 

 seventeen years after his death. The young Cordus described 

 living plants in a very accurate, systematic, and independent 

 fashion. In connection with his work Dr. Greene remarks: 



"Cesalpino, of the end of the sixteenth century, will be praised 

 in future milleniums for having founded Systematic Botany. 

 But had Valerius Cordus lived to only twice his nine-and-twenty 

 years, it is easy to conceive that the great Italian might have 



