thirty years a professor of medicine at Tubingen. Our common 
plant, Fuchsia is named after him. His “Stirpium Historia” 
contains five hundred large plates, arranged alphabetically by 
Greek names. 
The “Botanologican” by Euricius Cordus, is an interesting ac- 
count of imaginary conversations about plants between Cordus 
and his friends. It clearly explains that the plants of the ancients 
do not grow in Central Europe. His son, Valerius Cordus, lectured on 
botany in Wittenberg, and died in Rome at the early age of 
twenty-nine. His works were published after his death. He 
urged botanists to cease copying the descriptions of the ancients 
and to describe anew from nature. According to Tournefort, he 
was “the first of all men to excel in plant description.” 
In Italy the first of modern botanic gardens were started in 
Padua in 1545, and in Pisa shortly afterward. Luca Ghini, the first 
to make a scientific herbarium, was the teacher of Andrea Caesalpini, 
who emphasized the importance of the fruit in classification, as 
against vegetative characters. His work, “De Plantis Libris”, was 
published in 1583. Woody plants and herbs area fundamental divi- 
sion, says Caesalpini, because the most important function of 
plants is to take up food through the root and stem. The second 
function is reproduction, therefore the fruit is the second thing to 
be considered in classification. 
An important work, Pinax Theatri Botanici (1620), byGaspard 
Bauhin, of Basle, described more than six thousand species of 
plants, many more than any previous work. 
Joachim Jung, of Hamburg (1587-1657), was the first to state that 
woody plants and herbs should not form a fundamental division. 
For example, a locust tree which has pea-shaped blossoms should 
evidently be grouped with the pea; the woody stem is a minor 
character. More than a century passed before this idea was gen- 
erally accepted. 
The perfecting of the compound microscope, especially by Robert 
Hooke, and the anatomical studies of Malpighi and Grew, prepared 
the way for greatly improved botanical systems. 
The, “Historia Plantaruin”, by John Ray, published near the 
end of the seventeenth century, marks a great step forward. While 
keeping the divisions of woody plants and herbs, Ray makes, 
under these, the important sub-divisions of monocotyledons and 
dicotyledons, an improvement ignored by Tournefort and Lin- 
naeus. Ray also first clearly segregates the flowerless plants as a 
group, although he makes them a sub-division of the herbs. 
About the same time (1G91) Camerarius of Tubingen first con- 
ducted experiments proving that pollen is needed to produce per- 
fect seeds. His important writings passed almost unnoticed for 
a century. 
The botany of Tcurnnfos-t (1656-1708) was in many respects less 
satisfactory than that of Ray. However, by the very clear expo- 
