By /. M. Black. 
95. 
S.A. NAT., VOL. XV. 
June 12th, 1934. 
period known as the Middle Ages, all scientific research was 
discouraged, nay, it became even dangerous. It is true that in 
medicine, architecture, and agriculture the Arabs kept the torch 
of science burning for several centuries, but in botany they did 
little but copy from the Creek authors who had preceded them. 
The first herbalists who appeared towards the close of the 
Middle Ages were Italians and after them came the Germans, 
the English and the Dutch. One of their best points was that 
they published original drawings of the plants which they des¬ 
cribed, but as they usually merely copied descriptions from’ Dios- 
corides or Theosphratus, they sometimes fitted the drawings to 
the wrong description or vice versa. And they had not altogether 
freed themselves from medieval superstititions. For instance, 
Bock, a German herbalist, maintained that orchids have no seeds 
and that new plants arise from the excreta of birds. 
The foremost place among them should probably be held by 
Valerius Cordus, born in 1515 and a student at Wittenburg. 
W itte,nburg, as y r ou will all remember, was the university of 
Hamlet and Horatio. It was a famous German university in 
Shakespeare’s day. Founded in 1502, it ended by being trans¬ 
ferred to the neighbouring town of Halle in 1815. “The pre¬ 
eminence of Cordus/' says a biography, “rests on the fact that 
he was the first to teach men to cease from dependence on the 
poor descriptions of the ancients and to describe plants anew 
from nature.” He published his “History of Plants” at the age 
of 25, describing between 400 and 500 species. Then he went to 
Italy to study a southern flora, but died of malaria at Rome when 
only 29 years old. He solved to some extent a question which 
had puzzled all his predecessors—the method by which the ferns 
multiply. He says that the fern reproduces itself by means of 
the dust which is developed on the back of the leaves. We call 
that dust “spores” to-day. 
A long step forward was made by John Ray, an English > 
puritan divine, who studied plants near Cambridge. He used the 
number of cotyledons (these are the small seed-leaves which first 
appear above the ground after most plants have germinated) as 
a means of distinguishing two large groups of plants and it is 
to him that we owe the terms Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons. 
In 1690 he published a small book which he called a “Methodical 
Synopsis of British Species.” This was really the first British 
flora. By this time the microscope had been invented and lent 
immense aid to botanical research. 
