CHAPTER I.
The Botanists of Germany and the Netherlands from Brunfels to Kaspar Bauhin[1].
1530–1623
When those who are accustomed to modern botanical literature take up for the first time the works of Otto Brunfels (1530), Leonhard Fuchs (1542), Hieronymus Bock (Tragus), or of the later authors Rembert Dodoens (Dodonaus), Charles de l'Ecluse (Carolus Clusius), Matthias de l'Obel (Lobelius, 1576), or even those of Kaspar Bauhin from the beginning of the 17th century, they are surprised not only by the strange form, the curious and unfamiliar accessories from which what is really useful must be laboriously extracted, but still more by the extraordinary poverty of thought which characterises these composers of usually very thick folios. If however instead of travelling backwards from the present time they pursue the opposite direction; if they have previously occupied themselves with the botanical views of Aristotle and the comprehensive botanical works of his disciple Theophrastus of Eresus, with Pliny's Natural History and the medical science of Dioscorides;
- ↑ Kurt Sprengel in his 'Geschichte der Botanik,' i. 1817. and Ernst Meyer in his 'Geschichte der Botanik,' iv. 1857 have described the connection between the first beginnings of modern botany and the general state of learning in the 15th and 16th centuries; a particularly interesting notice of Valerius Cordus from the pen of Thilo Irmisch will be found in the 'Prüfungsprogramm' of the Schwarzburg gymnasium of Sondershausen for 1862. Here, as throughout, the present work will be confined to the investigation and description of the development of strictly botanical ideas.
