11-04-2017, 01:08 PM
(10-04-2017, 09:16 PM)DonaldFisk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In a 240 page manuscript of meaningless text, you're bound to find those sort of co-occurrences somewhere. Also, the plants are poorly drawn and few have been positively identified.
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No, they are not. The root on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the most accurate drawing of a rhizome I have seen in any manuscript dating before 1500. It includes the leaf scars in the correct proportion and spiral around the shoot. It includes dots to show the different texture on each scar in a way that is accurate. It includes the leading edge of the rhizome (the part that creates the next year's shoot) and has made it correctly scaly in contrast to the old part of the rhizome with the leaf scars.
The parts the illustrator cared about, or which are significant for that specific plant, are accurate. It's also the most accurate drawing of Cuscuta for its time that I've encountered so far. Most illustrators drew a bunch of scraggly lines. They didn't indicate the parasitic nature of the plant in any meaningful way (the way it intrudes into the roots), nor did they show the individual flowers as was done in the VMS.
Tragopogon is also very accurate and completely recognizable. If people don't recognize it, it's because they don't know the plant.
The reason some can't be identified is because they lack a detail or two that is needed to distinguish between one species or another but it wouldn't matter to the person using it because they would know beforehand which one it was. Take Viola as an example. There are three very similar species that could be represented by this drawing, so there's not enough detail to know which one, but it is Viola and it's quite well drawn.
The reason others can't be identified is because there are often two or three species with the same characteristics (like a basal whorl and parallel veins) but again, if the animal nibbling on the leaf is mnemonic and the person using the manuscript knew what it meant (or created the mnemonic in the first place), then they will have no trouble recognizing the plant.
If you understand plants, together with the VMS way of doing things, you gain respect for the plant drawings.
I'm pretty confident that the plant drawings are meaningful. That doesn't guarantee the text is meaningful because it may have been added by someone else for a different purpose, or at a later time, but one can't use the "crudeness" of the plant drawings (they are not crude, they're pretty good) as an argument for anything about the text.