Matching Plant Images Internally

[Mark Knowles]

If nothing further can be learned from even the best matchings, what is accomplished by pursuing progressively weaker examples?

I am not sure that much effort has been made to learn anything even from the best matchings.

I am not clear if you have understood, the primary reason that I personally am interested in matching the plants is as a means to potentially accessing their textual relationships not due to any personal horticultural fixation.

So far I have seen little to no evidence that anybody has made this textual study even for the best matching. Without including the less certain matchings in the study one cannot tell if they show evidence of, possibly strong, textual relationship. And if it turns out that there is no textual relationship whatsoever then that raises the question as to why that is and what if any conclusions can be drawn from that.

I have also discussed other ways in which these plant matching relationships might have implications for the correct order in which the different folios of the manuscript were written.

Generally though the approach of saying that this might not lead to results so is not worth doing is ultimately laziness.