manuscript of the latter’s De materia medica, made about
512, was rediscovered in Constantinople in the mid-16th
century and sold to the Holy Roman Emperor. This so-
called Codex Vindobonensis is still in Vienna. Other man-
uscripts of Dioscorides had been copied and then printed,
but this one remains a landmark for the quality of its il-
lustrations, obviously made from live plants. Elsewhere
naturalism was rarely seen in manuscript herbals until late
in the 14th century, when, for example, the artist of the
Carrara Herbal (British Library, MS. Egerton 2020) was
certainly drawing from life rather than copying his illus-
trations from increasingly stylized ones in earlier manu-
scripts. Herbals spread some knowledge of plants among a
wide public, for demand placed them among the earliest
scientific books to be written and then printed in vernac-
ular languages.
Accurate illustrations were needed as one route to ac-
curate identification, and the great herbals of the 16th
century, foremost among them those of BRUNFELS, FUCHS,
and MATTIOLI, are distinguished by the quality of their pic-
tures. The texts, in general, still dwell in the shadow of
Dioscorides, though descriptions of local plants from
northern Europe began to be added to those he had
known. Mattioli’s book, like some earlier herbals, in-
cluded instructions on distillation in some editions, a skill
considered necessary in the preparation of effective rem-
edies. Even the 16th-century doctrine of SIGNATURES, by
which plants were said to help the parts of the body they
resembled, necessitated reliable identification of the
plants concerned.
Practical instruction in the study of plants was made
easier by the establishment of BOTANIC GARDENSto teach
medical students about the sources of their remedies.
From the 1540s these gardens spread from Italy to most
other parts of Europe, often in association with newly es-
tablished professorships of botany. Herbaria (reference
collections of dried plants, both wild and cultivated) began
to be made about the same time. The gardens soon became
centers for the introduction of new plants as they were
discovered, for it was assumed that anything new might
have useful properties. Travelers imported new plants
from the East and West Indies, Asia, and North and South
America, among them cocoa, tobacco, and the potato.
Francisco Hernández (c. 1514–87), physician to Philip II
of Spain and the earliest traveler in the New World to
focus on plants, wrote up the results of his 1571–77 expe-
dition to Mexico for the king in his massive manuscript
“Rerum medicarum novae Hispaniae thesaurus” (Treasury
of the medical things of New Spain); much of this manu-
script was unfortunately lost in a fire in the Escorial in
1671, by which time it had been published only partially
and long after the author’s death (Mexico, 1615; illus-
trated edition Rome, 1651). More fortunate was the Colo-
quios dos Simples, e Drogas he Cousas Mediçinais da India,
by the Portuguese doctor Garcia da Orta (or Da Horta;
died 1570), who spent the last 36 years of his life in Goa,
where his book was published in 1563; the Flemish
botanist Carolus CLUSIUSmade a Latin abridgment of it
(1567, and several times reprinted), and the abridgment
was itself retranslated into English (1577), Italian (1582),
and French (1619). Betel nut and several kinds of spices
(cloves, nutmeg, mace) are among the plants discussed by
da Orta. A little later the Tractado de las drogas y medicinas
de las Indias Orientales, which although written in Spanish
was the work of another Portuguese doctor who visited
Goa, Cristoval Acosta (died 1580), was published at Bur-
gos in 1578, illustrated with woodcuts drawn from nature.
The greater the number of plants known, the greater
the need to classify them by a more sophisticated method
than by grouping those with similar uses or effects. The
important herbal compiled by Hieronymus Bock (1539)
echoed Theophrastus in its suggested divisions of the
plant kingdom, adding observations of his own to support
the arrangement. Other botanists proposed the form of
leaves or other parts of plants as a basis for classification,
but CESALPINO’s scheme, using the characters of seeds and
fruit as criteria for subdividing the larger groups of trees,
shrubs, and herbs, was the outstanding one of its period.
Gaspard BAUHIN, in his Pinax (1623), grouped plants with
common properties, and made divisions that roughly re-
semble genera and species, giving them distinctive names
that foreshadow the standard binomial nomenclature de-
veloped in the 18th century by Linnaeus. Bauhin’s system
started with relatively simple plants like grasses and ended
with more complex ones like trees, though he seems to
have been puzzled by the question of an appropriate niche
for the cryptogams. His classification seems a recognizable
precursor of those of John Ray and Joseph Tournefort later
in the century, and even that of Linnaeus. The Swiss nat-
uralist Konrad GESNER also distinguished genera and
species, but most of his botanical work remained unpub-
lished until the 18th century.
As early as 1592, in his Methodi herbariae, Adam ZA-
LUZANSKÝargued for the separation of botany from medi-
cine, although this independence was not achieved until
much later. Even so, the progression from early herbals,
mixing plant descriptions with folklore and stylized illus-
trations, to more rigorous ones with accurate drawings
from live specimens and accounts of new plants, shows
the development of the science. The systematic recording
and classification of all known plants established a base
for the growth of botanical studies, as more material be-
came available through exploration within Europe and be-
yond.
Further reading: Mauro Ambrosoli, The Wild and the
Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe,
1350–1850 (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Edward Lee Greene, Landmarks of
Botanical History, 2 vols (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1983).bboottaannyy 6655