140 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST. 
Tragus and Valerius Cordus, it would seem; for these are said to 
have pursued the gathering and studying of plants for the love 
of plants; and that when each began to think of writing a book, 
the purpose in either case was, not to employ draftsmen and 
engravers, but so carefully and faithfully to describe each plant 
from nature that, to all who could read, the species might be 
identified by descriptior alone. The folio of Tragus was published 
first in German, and made so strong an impression by virtue of the 
life-like picturing of plants by words, as well as by a vast 
amount of new information conveyed, that the learned botanical 
world seemed to demand all this in Latin, then still the language of 
the educated everywhere; and such an edition was given, and even 
illustrated by many wood cuts, largely copied in smaller size from 
Fuchs. Valerius Cordus was the last of the four German Fathers, 
and is usually treated by even German historians as the least among 
them. Sachs even passes him by with a remark that he was of no 
importance. Nevertheless, in the judgment of the author of the 
Landmarks, he was by far the ablest and most accomplished of 
them all, as well as the one who most advanced philosophic and 
real botany. His description of plants,—both ancient and classic 
plants, as well as new German species by the score or hundred—are 
now everywhere seen to far surpass those of any and all of his 
predecessors. 'The author of this volume of history reports that 
Cordus was the first of botanical investigators to note the mode of 
the enfoldment of any leaves in the bud, and of petals in flower 
buds; the first to distinguish anther-dust and call it pollen; 
first to affirm that ferns propagate by the dust on the back of 
leaves, and to state that this generative dust is not of the same 
structure as seed. All this, too, long before the invention of the 
microscope, hand lens, or spectacles. He is accredited as the actual 
first discover of such familiar types as Caltha palustris and Parnassia 
palustris and the cranberry vine, to which also he gave the generic 
name Oxycoccus, which it still is known by. Even the snowball 
bush, Viburnum Opulus variety, which was first seen by Cordus in 
a German mountain wilderness, and was named by him as a mere 
variety of the bush called upland cranberry. He was first to describe 
the sundew, and to publish a report on the nature of the so-called 
dew on its leaves. The term papilionaceous we appear to owe to 
Cordus, who is shown to have invented it—to have used it often, 
and even to have determined as true leguminous plants, certain 
