LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY GREENE 2/ J 



Cordus left no dissertations on the philosophy of plants; but only 

 his descriptions of some 500 species; and it is out of these fragments, 

 all posthumously published, that we gather proofs of his resplendent 

 genius. 



Phytography. When some years after Cordus' death the manu- 

 script of the Historia Plantarum had been sent to the erudite 

 Conrad Gesner at Zurich, in hope that he would approve the work 

 and procure its publication, this worthy, in his letter of acknow- 

 ledgment — subsequently printed — says that the four books are 

 " truly extraordinary because of the accuracy with which the plants 

 are described. "^ 



Almost a century and a half later Toumefort named Valerius 

 Cordus as having been "the first of all men to excel in plant de- 

 scription."^ Then coming down to the time of Linnaeus we shall 

 find the very learned botanist and historian Haller still more point- 

 edly crediting Valerius Cordus with having been "first to teach 

 men to cease from dependence on the poor descriptions of the 

 ancients, and to describe plants anew from nature."^ 



This, then, appears to be Cordus' title to special distinction among 

 German botanists of the sixteenth century. He is the inventor 

 of the art of phytography. This is saying very much, and the 

 warrant for it must be shown. In our study of Tragus we observed 

 that he, writing in Geiman, and for popular reading, also without 

 thought that his writing would ever have the helpful accompani- 

 ment of pictures, used an originality and a minuteness of detail in 

 his descriptions of many plants that were quite new in botanical 

 writing. It is one thing to write popular plant descriptions for 

 every class of readers, and quite another to institute a set form of 

 describing them, and that in the common language of the world of 

 learning, and as if for learned botanists only. Just this is what 

 Valerius Cordus did, thereby actually creating a phytography of a 

 new type. And this new phytography had in view the philosophic 

 end of doing away with the need of pictured illustrations. A 

 leading purpose of Cordus was to demonstrate that every species 

 could be so characterized in words as to be identifiable by de- 

 scription alone. It is, indeed, the only reason there ever was at 

 any time in botanical history for describing plants; and the remotest 

 ancients, when one of them undertook to describe a plant at all 

 did it not so badly, but often very well. The trouble they made 



> Gesner, in letter to Hieronymus Heroldus, Cordus' works (1561), p. 85. 

 » Tournef., Inst. Rei Herb. vol. i, p. 26. 

 ; Haller, BibliotkecaBotanica, vol. i, p. 282. 



