Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470-1670

In his History of Botany, Kurt Sprengel first used the honoured title, “The German Fathers of Botany,” to describe a group of herbalists—Brunfels, Bock, Fuchs and Cordus—whose w...

A General review of the subjects discussed in the foregoing chapters brings home to us several results of some interest. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the incalculable de...

In the art of botanical illustration, evolution was by no means a simple and straightforward process. We do not find, in Europe, a steady advance from early illustrations of poo...

During the preceding chapters, we have restricted our discussion to those writings which may be credited with having taken some part, however slight, in advancing the knowledge...

Soon after the appearance in Italy of the earliest printed editions of the Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, three works of great importance were published at Mainz in Germany....

Concerning the Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, a few remarks have been already made. This herbal was perhaps the first through which any kind of systematic knowledge of medici...

In the present book, the special subject treated is the evolution of the _printed herbal_, between the years 1470 and 1670, but it is impossible to arrive at clear ideas on this...

In the earliest European works on natural history—those of the Aristotelian school—we meet with an attempt to classify the different varieties of plants. It was inevitable that...

alike in giving very brief and inadequate accounts of the characters of the plants enumerated, although their descriptions often have a certain naïve charm. It is scarcely worth...

XIV. Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) [Drawn by G. Zocchi and engraved by F. Allegrini, 1765, after an old portrait in the Museum of the Botanic Garden at Pisa. Print in the Botany...

There is no doubt that, on the whole, Bauhin was markedly successful in recognising affinities within small cycles, but he broke down on the broader question of the relationship...

After the invention of printing, a very active period of book production followed, during which many works, which had previously passed a more or less lengthy existence in manus...

Probably one of the chief objects, which the early herbalists had in view in writing their books, was to enable the reader to identify various medicinal plants. Nevertheless, un...

_Nicotiana_, _Papaver_, _Hypecoum_ and _Argemone_—that is to say four genera from the Solanaceæ followed by three from the Papaveraceæ. The common character which brings them to...

eighteen genera, is headed ‘Umbelliferæ.’ Some of the sections represent truly natural groups. Book III, Section VI, for example, consists of ten genera of Compositæ, while Book...