276 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



was through giving but the names and medical properties in the 

 majority of instances. Euricius Cordus had expressed himself in 

 print as to the unreasonableness of hoping to find the names of all 

 German plants in Dioscorides and Pliny; and the logical sequence 

 was, that German types unknown to the ancients ought to begin 

 to be named and described. Knowing the intense devotion of the 

 father to the son, and recognizing the zeal and ability of the latter, 

 it is not possible to think of Valerius Cordus' work of describing 

 German plants as having had other than this origin. It was like- 

 wise of deliberate purpose that the help of the engraver's art was 

 to be dispensed with, as being unnecessary where the verbal descrip- 

 tions are what they ought to be, except to the untaught, to whom 

 descriptions are useless ; for whom, however, Cordus did not pre- 

 tend to write. 



That which I here affirm is a fact which became obscured, and 

 was in effect contradicted, by the editor and the publisher of Cordus' 

 posthumous works; for the folio appeared almost throughout 

 bedizened with woodcuts of plants, to the number of some 280 

 figures ; a condition of things which Cordus could not have dreamed 

 of as possible, and to which, living, it is most improbable that 

 he would have consented. It was by urgent demand of the 

 printer and publisher that figures were inserted. He evidently 

 considered them to be indispensable to the financial success of the 

 imdertaking; and most probably he was right in. that. The pro- 

 posal to publish Cordus' works came at the time when the new icon- 

 ographic movement that had been inaugurated by Brunfels thirty 

 years before was at its high tide of public favor; for Fuchsius' 

 larger and more specious volume with doubly numerous plates had 

 followed, and even Tragus had at last come out in an edition with 

 567 figures. It was not a time when the publisher would look for the 

 success of a volume of plant descriptions in Latin unaccompanied 

 by figures. The Strassburg printer, Rihelius, prospective publisher 

 of Cordus' Historia, was in possession of the plates of Tragus' work 

 and desired Gesner as editor to make use of them in as far as poss- 

 ible to illustrate the text. Gesner acceded to the proposition, and 

 did as well as he could, yet not altogether very well; for there 

 were some of Cordus' plant discoveries that were quite unknown 

 to Gesner; moreover, the latter sometimes erred rather sadly in 

 his interpretation of Cordus' diagnoses. Altogether, the attempt 

 to illustrate by those old woodcuts the beautiful texts of Cordus 

 has led to much misunderstanding and many errors in the inter- 

 pretation of his chapters ; the errors being in the main such as have 



