LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE 273 



Valerius Cordus was sixteen or seventeen years old was, as to its 

 descriptive text, nothing but the reiteration of ancient botany. 

 Soon after the publication of that work Euricius Cordus had 

 publicly cautioned men against expecting to find all the trees, 

 herbs, and flowers of Germany described in the botanies of the 

 ancients, who had known but the plants of the very different region 

 of the Mediterranean Sea. This was nothing like -an intimation 

 that the books of the ancient ^fcould not be serviceable to students 

 of German botany, and might therefore well be closed and laid 

 aside. That would have been the proposition of an ignorant man 

 and a charlatan; never of one of reason and erudition. The fields, 

 the gardens, culinary and ornamental, the orchards, waysides, and 

 hedgerows abounded in plants cultivated or naturalized which, in 

 part purposely and in part fortuitously, had been brought into 

 Germany from the South and from the East ; and the discussion of 

 just these formed no small part of the phytography of anti- 

 quity. All this had been clear to the elder Cordus, and was as 

 easily comprehensible to the younger. But there must now be 

 conveyed a better notion than we have yet gained of the rare 

 subjective equipment wherewith young Valerius went forth to the 

 botanical conquest of the great German forests and unexplored 

 mountain districts. On this we have the following from a contem- 

 porary once before quoted. 



" To the best possible education of an intellect naturally keen, 

 there was united in him that happy temperament to which nothing , 

 is impossible, or even difificult of attainment. To these gifts he ' 

 added a truly marvellous industry and assiduity in research ; and ', 

 above all a most wonderfully retentive memory for everything he ' 

 either saw in nature or read in books. In this he so greatly 

 excelled as to be able to carry in mind in their entirety descriptions 

 of things which he had not seen but was looking to find; thus 

 having the descriptions always available whenever occasion called 

 for the use of them. "^ 



Probably it is not unusual in modem botany for one who is 

 afield to carry in mind, as gathered out of books, the essential char- 

 acteristics of certain plants not yet met with, so that he is able to 

 recognize such the instant he first sees them ; but it will come as a 

 revelation to most botanists of the present, that just this thing 

 was being done almost four centuries ago, by a German boy in his 

 teens, and while as yet the only plant descriptions extant for him 



' Riffius, in Preface to Cordus' Annoiaiions on Dioscorides. 



