66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Nearly thirty years later, Henry Lyte translated into English the 

 famous Dutch 'Herbal' of Dodoens. Lyte was an Oxford student 

 who traveled in foreign lands and collected a number of rare plants, 

 and on his return to England founded one of the first botanical gardens 

 in this country. The title of his translation is 'A niewe Herball, or 

 Historie of Plantes: wherein is contayned the whole discourse and 

 perfect description of all sortes of Herbes and Plantes; their divers 

 and sundry kindes: their straunge Figures, Fashions, and Shapes: 

 their Names, Natures, Operations, and Vertues.' The book is most 

 beautifully illustrated, and contains the records of some capital pieces 

 of observation, but it is startling every now and then to meet with 

 statements like this, 'Alysson hanged in the house, or at the gate, or 

 entry, keepeth both man and beast from enchantments, or witching,' 

 and 'The seede of the garden Larckes spurre dronken is very good 

 agaynst the stinging of Scorpions, and indeede his virtue is so great 

 against their poyson, that the herbe throwen before the Scorpions, 

 doth cause them to be without force or power to do hurte, so that they 

 may not move or sturre, until this herbe be taken from them.' 



At the very end of the sixteenth century appeared the best known 

 of all the herbals, that of 'John Gerarde, of London, Master in Chir- 

 urgerie.' Gerarde seems to have been an unscrupulous plagiarist, for 

 he bases his herbal, quite without acknowledgment, on Priest's trans- 

 lation of Dodoens 's collected works. Also of his eighteen hundred 

 wood-cuts, less than twenty are original ! So, altogether, his great 

 reputation seems to have been built on somewhat frail foundations. 

 Still he appears to have been a first-rate botanist, and in his garden 

 in Holborn he cultivated more than a thousand different kinds of 

 plants. I can not help thinking how delighted he would have been 

 with a modern botanic garden, and particularly with one of the mod- 

 ern collections of insectivorous plants. For he gives a little figure of 

 Sarracenia, the pitcher plant, copied from Clusius, who says he re- 

 ceived the drawing with one dried leaf from an apothecary of Paris, 

 who himself received it from Lisbon. Gerarde reproduces the figure 

 'for the strangeness thereof,' and in the 'hope that some or other that 

 travell into forraine parts may finde this elegant plant, and know it b) 

 this small expression, and bring it home with them, that so we may 

 come to a perfecter knowledge thereof.' 



Later on the fashion set in of leavening botany with astrology. 

 The best known exponents of this kind* of pseudo-science are Culpeper 

 and Turner. Nicholas Culpeper seems to have been afflicted with 

 boundless self-conceit; the following is a sample of his bombastic 

 style : " To find out the Eeason of the operation of Herbs, Plants, etc., 

 by the Stars went I, and herein I could find but few Authors, but those 

 as full of nonsense and contradiction as an egg is full of meat; this 

 not being pleasing, and less profitable to me, I consulted with my two 

 Brothers, Dr. Eeason, and Dr. Experience, and took a voyage to visit 



