BOOK 23 



After nearly four hundred years we still read with 

 pleasure Bock's accounts of the pistillate flowers of the 

 hazel, the deciduous calyx of the poppy, the pistil of the 

 bilberry, the rooting stems of water-lilies, the hooks on 

 the twining stem of the hop, and the shooting-out 

 of the seeds of the wood-sorrel. He notes more dis- 

 tinctly than any other botanist of the time the difference 

 between stamens and styles, but has no true notion 

 of their physiological office, not even recognising that 

 one or both may be found in every flower. Particulars 

 of place and environment are added, and the descrip- 

 tions are enlivened by curious details, which give 

 them in many places a vivacity to which the text of 

 Brunfels or Fuchs makes no approach. 



Bock's grouping of plants is largely traditional. He 

 accepts the ancient division into trees, shrubs and 

 herbs. Since he gives no synoptic tables, far less 

 family-names with definitions, it is a matter of conjecture 

 what groups of genera, if any, he regarded as marked 

 out in nature. He inherited from Theophrastus and 

 Dioscorides a few natural groups : — Umbellifers, Thistles, 

 Chicories, Legumina, Labiates, Solanaceous plants, 

 Crucifers, Mallows, Catkin-bearing and Cone-bearing 

 trees, none of them precisely limited, and to this list he 

 added the (unnamed) Borages. He places rosemary and 

 lavender among the Labiates, notwithstanding their 

 woody stem. The nettle and the dead-nettle are 

 described in close succession, though the distinctive 

 generic names of Dioscorides are quoted. We find 

 groups founded on habitat {e.g. water-plants), or on 

 usefulness to man {e.g. kitchen-herbs), or on habit {e.g. 

 SerpentariaB or climbers, a group of Bock's own pro- 

 posing). The special value of floral characters was then 

 unsuspected. 



