28-06-2015, 08:50 PM
I think that the work of identifying the Voynich plants is definitely the work that we need. I think that previous failures in this direction are greatly attributed to the fact that researchers have been excessively meticulous and formal. Like "hey, this plant does not have such and such element, so it cannot be "plant X"." I like the view shared by some researchers (e.g. the Finnish biologist from Prof. Bax's page) who advise that the plants may well have been:
a) depicted by memory
b) depicted in their dried shape
c) exaggerated in their essential portions
Please add to that that the person who depicted all the stuff was a person from the pre-Linnaeus era.
What I have proposed is to dedicate a separate subforum for this work, with one thread for each plant, and just implement a community brainstorm.
Moreover, supposing medical direction, most books of this kind would necessarily contain some common subset of plants. So, to begin with, one could take some book like Conservatio sanitatis by Miechowsky and try to match the plants mentioned there to plants in the VMS. This is the work which I planned to undertake myself, but... well I did not find time yet
a) depicted by memory
b) depicted in their dried shape
c) exaggerated in their essential portions
Please add to that that the person who depicted all the stuff was a person from the pre-Linnaeus era.
What I have proposed is to dedicate a separate subforum for this work, with one thread for each plant, and just implement a community brainstorm.
Moreover, supposing medical direction, most books of this kind would necessarily contain some common subset of plants. So, to begin with, one could take some book like Conservatio sanitatis by Miechowsky and try to match the plants mentioned there to plants in the VMS. This is the work which I planned to undertake myself, but... well I did not find time yet