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This book deals with the old English Herbals from Anglo-Saxon times to the end of the Seventeenth Century. There is a chapter on Early MS. herbals which treats of Anglo-Saxon plant-lore and folk-medicine of which these MSS. are the sole source.

A chapter is devoted to herbals written in connection with the colonization of America by the Spaniards and English. There is also a Bibliography of English and Foreign Herbals.

1390 —— Traité de la Gangrene. 12mo., half calf 1744 3 16 0
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De Toni, Ettore. Il Libro dei Semplici di BENEDETTO RINIO. *Memorie della Pontificia Accad. delle Scienze, Nuovi Lincei*, 5, 171-278; 7, 275-398; 8, 123-264, 1919-1925.

ISIS

Herbal edited from a MS. of the Bibl. Marciana in Venice. The work was composed by the physician BENEDETTO RINIO (established in Venice in 1415), and illustrated by the painter ANDREA AMADIO. RUSKIN was enthusiastic over these illustrations and had many of them copied for him. See elaborate review by ACHILLE FORTI in *Rivista di storia delle scienze* (1926, 294-300).

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138

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**Aurner, Nellie Slayton.** Caxton : mirrour of fifteenth-century letters.
A study of the literature of the first English press. XVI + 304 p.,
illus. London, ALLAN, 1926.
ISIS

**Basmadjian, K. J.** Le système quadrilataire et l'opothérapie chez AMIRDOVLAT. *Bull. de la Soc. fr. d'hist. de la Méd.*, 20, 355, 1926. ISIS

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Folio 51 verso. Lycopsis (family Boraginaceae), or one of the nearly allied genera (as symphytum). Common name: Bugloss.

Dioscorides has symphyton. Also called Buglossa, Herba bovis lingua.

The cymes of the lycopsis are usually dichotomous, but I have found a statement (reference mislaid) that if you can find a trichotomous one it will cure tertian fever. (Compare with drawing in the MS.)

Coloring in the MS: root, pale brownish; stem, pale green; leaves, bright green; heads, whitish with dark blue tips.

The oblique corollas, decurrent leaf bases, ox-tongue shape of leaves, and thick, fleshy root, are very characteristic of Lycopsis. I have examined herbarium specimens carefully. The coloring of the root should be a little darker for Lycopsis.

Folio 6 verso. Castor oil plant (ricinus communis).

Dioscorides calls it kiki: it is also called arbor mirabilis and palma Christi.

Coloring in the MS: leaves and balls green, with uncolored points to balls.

PREFACE

THE great work compiled during the first century A.D. by DIOSCORIDES of Anazarba in Cilicia has been the chief source whence, for fifteen centuries and more, herbalists of all nations have drawn their inspiration, yet no English translation has hitherto been published.

The first English writer to realize the importance of rendering this fountain-head of medical and botanical knowledge available for his fellow-countrymen was JOHN GOODYER, the great Botanist of Petersfield. Between the years 1652 and 1655 he laboriously wrote out the entire Greek text with an interlinear English translation on 4,540 quarto pages; and this, so far as I am aware, is the one and only attempt at an English Dioscorides.

Even as Philemon Holland is worthy of the highest praise for having had the courage to translate the works of the elder Pliny, and so to cause him, with his natural curiosities, to live again for the delectation of Englishmen in the seventeenth century, so the translation of John Goodyer does reflect the extent to which the Dioscoridean *Materia Medica* might have been available to such Elizabethan and Jacobean Herbalists—as Gerard, Parkinson, and others. It is therefore a source of the first importance from the point of view of the History of the English Herbal.

Goodyer's work was never printed. Perhaps he failed to find a patron such as Holland's Sir Robert Cecil; and in his day 'to set foot forward in forreine ground without the countenance of some worthie personage' was too 'fearefull' a risk for a publisher. But whatever the cause of its non-appearance by 1664, Goodyer's manuscript translation, with his fine botanical library, came to Magdalen College. For centuries it has remained unnoticed and unused by generations of classical tutors who, in lectures on the classics, have preached the sterile joys of reading

vi

PREFACE

dead languages in the original, rather than the duty of
making the contained information available to their
fellow-countrymen.

The justification for the present and largely uncorrected
edition of Goodyer's translation is that it reproduces the
atmosphere of his style, that it is a valuable historical
document, and that it may still stimulate the curious to
sift the indigenous from the exotic, and to discover the
sources of much fictitious matter. While certain needful
changes have been made in punctuation and order of
words to make their meaning clearer, no drastic attempt
has been made to alter the spelling, or even to make it
uniform or to accord with nineteenth-century practice.

If our text presents a Greek work of the first century as
understood in Hampshire in the sixteenth century, the
illustrations have yet higher interest. They are the work
of a Byzantine artist of about A.D. 512, for presentation to
Juliana Anicia, daughter of Anicius Olybrius, Emperor of
the West in 472. And although I cannot quite assume with
my friend Dr. Singer that the Byzantine artist was incap-
able of faithfully representing living plants, save by making
slavish copies from older drawings, there is good internal
evidence that he did as a matter of fact base his drawings
upon originals that were not far removed from sketches by
the famous CRATEUAS, whose plant-descriptions are occa-
sionally quoted in the text. Pliny, who was well acquainted
with the technical difficulties, mentions several Greek
artists who had made the attempt of illustrating floras, but
he did not write very enthusiastically about their success.

They painted every herb in their colours, and under their
portraits they couched and subscribed their several natures and
effects. But what certainly could there be therein? pictures, you
know, are deceitfull; also, in representing such a number of colours,
and especially representing the lively hew of Hearbs according to
their nature as they grow, no marvell if they that limned and
drew them out, did fail and degenerat from the first pattern and
originall. Besides they came far short of the mark, setting out
hearbs as they did at one only season (to wit, either in their floure,

PREFACE

vii

or in seed-time) for they change and alter their form and shape
every quarter of the yeare.

Crateuas, however, was among those whom he con-
sidered worthy of special mention for having written on
Herbs in a most pleasant and plausible manner. He was
a rhizotomist as well as an author. He had had the advan-
tage of being body physician to Mithridates VI Eupator
(120-63 B.C.), the most enlightened ruler of Pontus, who
described the plants of his kingdom by his own hand,¹ and
who had the reputation of knowing more about poisons
and their antidotes than any one else in his day: that most
potent antidote, the *mithridate*, preserved his name all
through the Middle Ages.

The illustrated work of Crateuas was of first-rate signi-
ficance in the history of botany, for it is reported to have
comprised the most life-like pictures of plants drawn at
that time. So skilful was he that he has been justly called
the ‘father of plant illustration’. And, it is remarkable
that the best of the Anician drawings are just those which
are associated with explanatory texts containing quota-
tions from Crateuas.

Dr. Singer has indicated eleven figures of plants, as
presumably by Crateuas; and they have been identified by
Mr. A. J. Wilmott as *Asarum europaeum* (1.9) ; *Plantago sp.*
(2.153) ; *Asphodelus sp.* (2.199) ; *Papaver dubium* (2.207) ;2
*Adonis aestivalis* (2.208) ; *Anagallis arvensis* and *A. foemina*
(2.209) ; *Aristolochia pallida* (3.4) ; *Aristolochia semper-
virens* (3.5) ; *Salvia multifida* (4.36) ;2 *Silene linifolia* (4.120.)2
In addition to these, though nos. 2.154 and 4.35 are doubt-
ful, the merit of the figure of *Thlaspi Bursapastoris* (2.186)
is excellent, as too are many of the other figures, some of
which have evidently got attached to the wrong descrip-
tions, e.g. *Moly* (3.54). Yet another of the plants of
Crateuas is specially mentioned by Pliny,³ and for the

¹ Pliny, XXV. 62.

² These identifications are to be preferred to those of Sibthorp and Daubeny printed in the text.

³ Pliny, *Natural History*, xxii. 22.

viii

PREFACE

sake of completeness we may quote Holland's translation
here.

ALIMON. Crateuas hath made mention of a third sort, which hath
longer leaves than the rest, and more rough in the hand, in smell
resembling the Cipres tree; who saith that it delighteth to grow
principally under the Yvie tree; which if it be taken to the weight
of 3 oboli in a sextar of water, helpeth those that have their heads
and bodies drawn far back, and such as are troubled with the
contraction and shrinking of sinews.

This may or may not be the 'Alimos' of Dioscorides, i. 20.

Many of the figures seem hopeless of interpretation. Nevertheless, we have printed them, in the hope that field-botanists when travelling in the special localities whence the Dioscoridean flora was derived, may thus recognize a few of the plants which through mistaken features it has been impossible to identify in a herbarium of dried plants.

The specific names with which we have headed every
chapter are perhaps less justifiable.

In the present state of uncertainty we have thought it
better to abstain from adding to the long lists of suggested
synonyms which have been proposed, and to quote names
from the list of identifications appended by Charles Dau-
beny to his 'Lectures on Roman Husbandry' 1857, and
reprinted with a few corrections as an appendix to this
book on page 600. In other cases the names suggested
have been derived from Sprengel's edition of Dioscorides.
The Labiate and Composite identifications have been
revised by Mr. E. Baker and by Messrs. H. W. Pugsley and
Cecil Norman respectively. Unfortunately in many cases
the plant described is apparently not the same as the plant
figured, so the name quoted may apply to either one or the
other, but not to both. Still, if these imperfect identifica-
tions stimulate by their falsity the production of a revised
version, they will not have been printed in vain.

I desire here to make mention of the great loss which
such historical studies as these have suffered through the
recent death of Dr. Otto Stapf of Kew. For many years he