Species Tragia glabrescens

For Hieronymus Tragus (Hieronymus Jerome Bock) (1498–1554), German botanist, physician, teacher, Lutheran minister, and herbalist author. He possibly worked as caretaker in the gardens of Count Palatine Ludwig, who funded his theology and medicine studies at university. He authored New Kreuterbuck, published by Rihel in 1539, a botanical herbal featuring some 700 German plants, written in vernacular German, in which the plants were arranged to associate ‘such plants as nature seems to have linked together by similarity of form’, the first known attempt at a natural classification of plants. It was reprinted in 1545 with more than 500 illustrations by David Handel.