176 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



it was not at once approved in Brunfels' time. There were learned 

 men among his contemporaries who were at first startled by, and 

 then made light of his having brought forward some of the most 

 plebeian and beggarly roadside pests, and introduced them as 

 upon an equality into the company of the nobler growths of the 

 fields and meadows, and of the vegetable and drug gardens. Among 

 the more serious faults that his contemporary Fuchsius found with 

 Brunfels' work, one was "That he sometimes takes for subjects 

 the most common weeds." ' 



By at least one other item of his method, over and above this 

 of ignoring the old distinction between things as domesticated and 

 wild, does Brunfels commend himself as a believer in some kiiid 

 of a natural classification. He declines to adopt anything like an 

 alphabetic sequence of genera; a kind of arrangement which was 

 adhered to by several of his noted botanical contemporaries, as 

 we shall see. He prefers freedom to express, if but tacitly, some 

 ideas of a more rational grouping, such as the alphabetic succession 

 of names almost wholly precludes; and, with the medical botanist, 

 that arrangement may be most convenient, if not even in a sense 

 natural, in which plants, whether alike or unlike as to morphology, 

 are held in juxtaposition by agreement as to what are taken to be 

 their medicinal virtues. 



For an example of this kind of classifying carried to an extreme, 

 take his two genera of liverworts, Hepatica and Jecoraria. The 

 former is that anemoneous herb that has retained in later times 

 the name Hepatica; the other is the common Marchantia polymorpha, 

 a cryptogam. The two are figured and described on opposite pages, 

 and their medicinal uses are said to be the same.^ It may be noted 

 that each bears alike, even in our 'time, the common name of liverwort. 

 Before Brunfels Hepatica usually meant the plant Marchantia, 

 which was also called Jecoraria, and the restriction of the name 

 Hepatica to the genus of anemone allies, and of Jecoraria to the 

 lichenoid hepatic, seems to date from Brunfels, and was a distinctly 

 taxonomic movement on his part; as if his judgment had been 

 that types so very unlike morphologically ought not to be treated 

 of under one and the same generic name. 



Because of their having been employed interchangeably in 

 medicine, under the common designation of Verbena, our medical 

 botanist figures and discusses, one next after the other. Verbena 

 officinalis and Senecio vulgaris.^ The botanist of a later time will 



' Fuchsius, Hist. Stirp. in Epistola Nuncupatoria. 



2 Herb. Viv. Icon., vol. i, pp. 190, 191. 



3 Ibid., pp. 119-123. 



