LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HrexORY — GREENE I 95 



charges with having brought in this confusion under which the 

 pharmacy of his time is laboring, and denouncing the errors of 

 such authors with scathing sarcasms. The aim of the essay is the 

 eUmination of gross errors from the pharmacopeia, and all the 

 subjects are plants that have been in use for ages. Nothing new is 

 added; neither is there any trace of the philosophic investigation 

 of the plant world as such; or the revelation of any interest in 

 plant life and form in themselves considered. But this is Fuchsius' 

 juvenile botanical production. Will there be awakened within 

 him later an interest in plants as plants rather than as drugs ? 



There is no evidence that such an awakening ever came ; or that 

 any considerable part of his work with plants had other than 

 utilitarian ends primarily in view. In the last chapter of this 

 -(earliest piece of his botanical writing he expresses the design of 

 going through the whole of Greek and Latin botany, correcting 

 •errors and giving the right identification of everything, after the 

 method exemplified in the treatise he is now concluding; even 

 adding that he has been urged to do this by those fully convinced 

 of the great need of such a work. But this promise remained un- 

 fulfilled. The twofold duties incident to a professor's chair and an 

 extensive medical practice claimed his energies, and the twofold 

 emoluments enabled him to undertake a line of botanical work — 

 botanical recreation, rather — ^which it is improbable he ever would 

 have thought of but for the great success which had promptly 

 attended the publication of Brunfels' Icones. He employed two 

 painters, and also the best engraver in Strassburg,' and set them 

 to work figuring plants. Thus within seven or eight years after 

 the appearing of Brunfels' work Fuchsius had ready for the press 

 his great volume of the Historia Stirpium; though it was not is- 

 sued from the press until some four years later, that is, in 1542. 

 Its success seems to have been speedily assured, and was really 

 wonderful. To a generation that had been accustomed to such 

 books as the Hortus Sanitatis, filled with the most wretched carica- 

 tures of plants in place of true representations of them, this great 

 book by Fuchsius must have appeared as nothing less than luxur- 

 ious ; and the epoch which, ten years earlier, Brunfels had introduced 

 by his 13 s good illustrations of as many plants, was strongly ac- 

 •centuateTby the appearing of this new volume with upwards of 500 

 large plates more than equaling, on the average, those of Brunfels. 



' The portraits of these artists, with their names, Heinrich Fiillmaurer, 

 Albert Meyer, and Veit Rudolf Speckle, are appended to the first edition 

 ■of the Historia Stirpium. 



