THE EARLIEST LOCAL FLORA. I I J 
medicine at Nordhausen; a man born and educated in the days 
when a boy too dull or indolent to face the difficulties of Latin 
and Greek grammar, and unwilling to devote a decade of his 
early life to the mastery of them, could never hope to obtain a 
college education or university degree, or rise to the practice of 
a profession. 
No one has told us that this Dr. Johannes Thalius was very 
fond of botany, or that the happiest days of his life were those 
in which he found freedom to go away to the nearest mountain 
range to search for plants old and new; or that he was a great 
scholar in botany, familiar with every book about trees or shrubs 
or herbs that had ever been written, from Theophrastus, Dios- 
corides and Pliny down to his own contemporaries, Dodonaeus, 
Lobelius, Matthiolus, Cordus and Tragus and Gesner. Yet, in the 
simplest, most unostentatious manner, all this comes out in the 
“ Sylva Harcynia,” which is the shorter title of this small book 
of botany in Latin. 
That he is not writing for the benefit of pharmacists or any 
other tradespeople, but only for the scientific botanist, is evinced 
by the method of the book; for, while using only the Greek or 
Latin names of genera, he defines no genus, except such as he 
finds new and in need of a name. He treats of the species all in 
the alphabetic order of the generic names. His book has no 
index, and needs none. Only botanists, persons who know the 
genera of plants and the scientific names of them, are going to 
care about the book, anyway. 
By the alphabetic order, the genus Adiantum is the first, natur¬ 
ally. He catalogues four species, namely, A. pulcherrimum, A. 
candidum, A. aphyllum and A. achrosticum ; binary names, of 
course, but that is hardly noteworthy. It is the natural nomen¬ 
clature everywhere, in all ages, by all authors, especially in all 
departments of nature study. Well, he has so much to say about 
these four Adiantums that the genus fills the initial page of the 
catalogue. The first species listed, A. pulcherrimum, he describes 
fully, and this evidently in order that others who may in the future 
go botanizing in the Hartz Mountains may be on the lookout for 
this plant, and may also have the means of determining it when 
