Matching “pharma” / “small plants” labels in context

[Anton]

Thank you, Anton!

I guess Wladimir's post you are referring to is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?

No, rather to this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This is effectively, Wladimir's remark as to my older research where I assumed that first vords of botanical folios stand for names of plants (which, in turn, was inspired by Stephen Bax's paper of 2014).

the illustrations are not detailed enough to provide identification of the plants

The idea is that "small plants" (plants from the pharma section) may be identified as elements of "large plants" (plants from the botanical section), and thus the name of a given "small plant" may be deduced from the name of the large plant. The name of the large plant is, in turn, suggested by image mnemonics.

Several striking identifications of plants aided by mnemonics in the beginning of this year (this activity was somewhat undermined by the "Coventry event", I think we should resume it) suggest that encoding the large plant names via image mnemonics is a systematic practice employed by the VMS author. In that case, there might be no plant names in the botanical section text at all!

Wladimir found several matches of "small plants" against "large plants" (to be found somewhere on the forum). I do not know whether he finished that work or stopped somewhere along the way, and I also don't know if all small plants can be matched to large ones, or only a subset of those - I don't follow pharma section discussions closely. If some small plants cannot be matched against large plants, this would mean one of the following:

• those small plants' names are to be found somewhere in the pharma section text (presumably, in the respective labels)
  
• those small plants' identification should rely on mnemonics of the respective small plant itself.