The pear can be improved only where the pear-tree flourishes, and then only when assisted by the foresight and desire of men. This happy combination seems not to exist in Europe outside of Italy, France, Belgium, and England. The pear flourishes along the Danube, in parts of Austria and southern Germany, and along the upper Rhine, but the people of these regions seem to have been followers rather than leaders in developing this fruit, having produced almost no meritorious varieties. America is indebted to the vast region of central and western Europe for but one major variety, the Forelle, and this sort is of little importance. Pomology, the world over, however, is indebted to Germany for much valuable pomological literature. Cordus, Mayer, Christ, Diel, Dittrich, Truchsess, Hinkert, Dochnahl, Oberdieck, Engelbrecht, Lauche, and Gaucher, all Germans, and Kraft, an Austrian, have been industrious compilers, and have given pomology some of its best texts on systematic pomology. Cordus, earliest German pomological writer, wrote an illuminating chapter in the history of the pear, which must be reproduced. Valerius Cordus, 1515-1544, a botanical genius, made botanical expeditions to nearly every part of Germany, in the course of which he made special study of the apple and the pear. He described fifty pears and thirty-one apples. These descriptions are noteworthy as the earliest for these fruits in Germany. Cordus is called by one great botanist, "the inventor of the art of describing plants;" by another, he is said to have been "first to teach men to cease from dependence on the poor descriptions of the ancients and to describe plants anew from nature;" a third botanical authority says of him, "the first of all men to excel in plant description;" while a fourth writes of the four books of his _Historia Plantarum_ "truly extraordinary because of the accuracy with which the plants are described." Thus, botanists accord him special distinction, but pomologists seem not to know this resplendent systemist of the sixteenth century, who, as we shall see, is especially deserving of pomological recognition.