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make pictures and descriptions direct from nature. Otto 

 Brunfels was a monk who embraced Protestantism and became a 

 teacher. His Herbarum Vivce I cones (1530) contains one hun- 

 dred and thirty-five beautiful and naturalistic illustrations of 

 plants from the Strasburg region. He often quotes Dioscorides, 

 but does not realize that he deals with a different flora. 



Leonard Fuchs, professor of medicine at Tubingen, made about 

 five hundred drawings for his Stirphim Historia. The plants 

 are arranged alphabetically by Greek names. "There is nothing 

 in this life pleasanter and more delightful," he writes, "than to 

 wander over woods, mountains and plains adorned with flowers 

 and plants of various sorts and to gaze intently upon them." 



Bock, or Tragus, criticized Fuch's alphabetical arrangement. 

 In his Neu Kreiiterhuch, with descriptions in German, he de- 

 scribes herbs, shrubs and trees "keeping together such forms as 

 nature seems to have linked together by similarity of form." 

 The shape of leaves, branching, roots, size and color of flowers, 

 but not their structure, were noted. "Mushrooms," he says, 

 "are neither herbs nor roots, neither flowers nor seeds, but merely 

 the superfluous moisture of the earth and trees." It was gener- 

 ally understood ferns had no seeds; for four years, Bock says, 

 he kept vigil all midsummer night, and always found very minute 

 black seeds on the pieces of cloth he had placed under the plants ; 

 moreover, he employed no cabalistics, conjurings or magic of 

 any kind. 



The Botanologicon by Euricius Cordus is an interesting ac- 

 count of an imaginary conversation about plants between Cordus 

 and his friends. It clearly explains that the plants of the ancients 

 do not grow in Central Europe. His son, Valerius Cordus, 

 lectured on botany in Wittenberg but died of fever in Rome 

 when only twenty-nine. His works were published after his 

 death. He urged botanists to cease copying the descriptions 

 of the ancients and to describe anew from nature. According 

 to Tournefort, he was "the first of all men to excel in plant 

 description." 



In Italy Andrea Cesalpini published De Plantis Libri XVI in 



