Translated from the Dutch by Thomas and Pam Kayser, October 2000.
A NATURAL HISTORY DOCUMENT OF THE 16th CENTURY
If you look up Phallus impudicus in old botanical books, you will find references to a much older description by Dr. Hadrianus Junius, the person who discovered the stinkhorn in these regions. Thus, you will find in the "Cruydtboeck" (herb book) by Dodonaeus (1608), a comprehensive story about the "zeecampernoeli" or "devil’s eggs" (with nice peculiarities, such as that cats are very fond of them and that a poultice made from the stinkhorn heals the pain of flerecijn and gout), and also that Hadrianus Junius mentions Phallus and describes it in a very beautiful Latin poem. Dalechamp, Linneus, Commelin, de Goeter, all come back to the description by Hadrianus Junius, and it was evidently the basis for their own pronouncements. In the case of such a remarkable product of nature as this, it seemed to me worthwhile to have a closer look at the oldest description.
The writer Hadrianus Junius, or in our language Adriaan de Jong, was recognized as a man of significance in his own time and long after. In Schrevelius’ "Description of Haarlem" (Beschrijving van Haarlem) published in 1754, he is introduced to us as one of the most distinguished scientists that ever lived in the town on the Spaarne, or even in the whole country. "No men more famous has Holland than Erasmus of Rotterdam and Hadrianus Junius of Hoorn", we read in Part II on page 405. He was born on 1 July 1512 in Hoorn, but was raised and educated in all disciplines in our dear town of Haarlem, the seat of a famous Latin school founded in 1389 which had the learned Friesian Doccomius as director. In that school, the predecessor of the present day Gymnasium, said A. de Jong was such a good pupil, that he was called the "Phoenix of the Haarlem youth" and he was remembered even long after he had left the school benches. Indeed, when he had finished his studies in medicine and literature at the University of Louvain, he was called to Copenhagen to become the tutor of the Danish princes. The city council of Haarlem went there to persuade him to return from the Sond to the Spaarne, to become rector of this same school where he had excelled as a pupil. He accepted the appointment and he stayed here until just before the siege; he then moved first to Delft and later to Arnemuiden in Zeeland, which was in those days an important trading town and port, though it is not any longer. He died there on 16 June 1575 and was buried in the Grote Kerk (Great Church). It would not be difficult to find evidence in old papers, that Dr. H. Junius had the reputation among his contemporaries of being a miracle of learning. One of his countrymen, Th. Vellius, testifies in the Hoornsche chronicle that Junius was "a man in whom all the talents were excellent, as a master in medicine as well as an historian; who did not have an equal in knowledge of language and whose great intellect was born for poetry."
He wrote many treatises on various subjects. Most of his work was printed in Leiden, some in Antwerp and Basle. The best known is his book Batavia, commissioned by the Staten van Holland ("The States of Holland") and printed in Leiden by Plantyn in 1588; it is a kind of history of Holland, including descriptions of the towns. His treatise, which is now very rare, on the Phallus impudicus ("of the campernoelje or devil’s bread, that growth in the dunes of Holland") was first published in 1564 in Delft, and was reprinted in Leiden in 1601. It is the latter edition, which I, through friendly mediation of the city librarian of Haarlem, was allowed to receive from the Bibliotheca Thysiana in Leiden for my work; the old title page is reproduced here at half its size. The honorable director of the Haarlem gymnasium, Dr. A. H. Garrer, was prepared, at my request, to translate the treatise, which was written in difficult Latin by his 16th century predecessor. It is because of him that the readers of De Levende Natuur ("Living Nature") see before them an accurate translation of this first ever description of Phallus, illustrated with pictures of the stinkhorn, which Dr. H. Junius had designed by the famous painter Maerten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), after whom a street has been named and whose beautiful paintings can be found in the city museum. Mr. Garrer is not to blame for one thing, the complex and sinister manner of the description. You already have to read the first long sentence of the Phallus treatise several times before you start to understand it, and even then the end remains a mystery. (In Latin it reads; nisi fortê hanc illi laudem venerorum minus restibilis seges degenet, possibly it is meant to be ironic, in the sense that the author only means to point out that it was a wise decision of nature to ensure that poisonous seed quickly lose their ability to germinate.) In these ancient times, scientists used to decorate their style excessively with philosophy and mythology, even in those cases where we would now not consider it necessary, as in the case of the stinkhorn. It is also for that reason that only the prose description has been translated and not the poetry description, which only contains more mythology, but nothing new. Furthermore the actual description is quite accurate and it is understandable that it was generally copied in the old botanical literature, even to the extent that - exclusively while Dr. Junius collected for the first time in our dunes - Phallus had long before been known as a specific Dutch fungus which was tied to the vicinity of the sea (fungus marinus), even though it is found in the whole of Europe. It is funny that we find in these old works the popular name ungers eyeren for the undeveloped Phallus, closely related to the present "devil’s eggs" or "witches eggs". "Ungers" or "unjer" are the evil spirits, the "white wives" as they say in the Achterhoek in Gelderland (part of Eastern Netherlands).
As a natural history document the Phallus description by Dr. Hadrianus Junius remains something remarkable, because it is three and a half centuries old and is written by a famous man, who mirabile dictu, walked in the dunes and there studied Nature - in a period when as a rule learning and wisdom were only pursued from Greek and Roman writings, and direct observation was not seen as the task of the scholar.
Haarlem, Oct. 1906 M. Gresshoff
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