FW: Re: Toresella

["ddhopper" <ddhopper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: ddhopper [mailto:ddhopper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 4:41 AM
To: philip.marshall@xxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Re: Toresella


The botanist Hugh O'Neill, a friend of R.G. Kent, did publish his
identifications as "tentative", and drew his speculation on that cautious
phrase.  I don't think his identifications were "careless" or his writing
presumptuous or "provocative".  He simply chose the two most identifiable
plants and wrote his brief pamphlet as a guide for researchers.  Countless
people have identified the flower as a sunflower, and the capsicum is very
distinctive.  When Dana's views are added to O'Neill's identification of
only a couple of plants, a pattern builds toward early to middle 16th
century.  Perhaps it is not O'Neill who was careless, but other researchers
in ignoring or not pursuing the more obvious.  Perhaps...

In O'Neill's unpublished notes he identifies quite a few more plants to my
understanding.

DDHopper

-----Original Message-----
From: philip.marshall@xxxxxxxx [mailto:philip.marshall@xxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 12:13 AM
To: voynich@xxxxxxxx
Subject: Fwd: Re: Toresella


If the VMS were penned in the second half of the XVI
>> century, then I have no difficulty in accepting the presence of
botanical
>> samples from the Western Hemisphere; however, I am not convinced
that
>> the sunflower identification is accurate.
>
>	It was Brumbaugh that said that the sunflower and pepper showed that
>it was written after the discovery of the New World.  He thought that
>the text
>was nonsense, written by Dee and Kelly to make money.  He did think
that
>the
>labels were meaningful, Latin enciphered in a rudimentary cipher.  We
no
>longer
>accept any of this.
>
>

More precisely, I believe that it was Hugh O'Neill who first identified
(carelessly, I would say) the "sunflower" and "pepper" and emphasized
that they would date the MS to after 1493 (when Columbus returned to
Europe with seeds). Brumbaugh was responsible only for the
popularization of O'Neill's provocative claim.

-Philip Marshall