And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were suddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with an earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with which they had never been investigated before.  “Nature,” says Professor Planchon, “long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was opening up infinite vistas.  A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of the ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts.  Nevertheless learning did her work.  She rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, commented on the texts of ancient authors.  Then came in observation, which showed that more was to be seen in one blade of grass than in any page of Pliny.  Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a man of transition, while he was one of progress.  He reflected the past; he opened and prepared the future.  If he commented on Dioscorides, if he remained faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his ’History of Fishes’ a monument which our century respects.  He is above all an inspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a school, the foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in his speech what is better than all systems, the communicative power which urges a generation of disciples along the path of independent research, with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim.”

Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house—­for professors in those days took private pupils as lodgers—­worked the group of botanists whom Linnaeus calls “the Fathers,” the authors of the descriptive botany of the sixteenth century.  Their names, and those of their disciples and their disciples again, are household words in the mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in the plants which have been named after them.  The Lobelia commemorates Lobel, one of Rondelet’s most famous pupils, who wrote those ‘Adversaria’ which contain so many curious sketches of Rondelet’s botanical expeditions, and who inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited his anatomical) manuscripts.  The Magnolia commemorates the Magnols; the Sarracenia, Sarrasin of Lyons; the Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia, Bauhin’s earlier German master, Leonard Fuchs; and the Clusia—­the received name of that terrible “Matapalo,” or “Scotch attorney,” of the West Indies, which kills the hugest tree, to become as huge a tree itself—­immortalizes the great Clusius, Charles de l’Escluse, citizen of Arras, who after studying civil law at Louvain, philosophy at Marburg, and theology at Wittemberg under Melancthon, came to Montpellier in 1551, to live in Rondelet’s own house, and become the greatest botanist of his age.