65 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
HERBALS 
The utilitarian side of botany had its inception in its 
application to medicine. Various plants, from the earliest 
times, had been used as healing agents, and it became neces- 
sary to study them in order to recognize the kinds employed 
for the cure of different diseases. The herbalists’ knowledge 
was of course in the first place transmitted entirely by word 
of mouth, but as time went on oral tradition was replaced by 
the written record. 
The Materia Medica of Dioscorides, a manuscript copy of 
which is at Vienna, is the earliest extant European work deal- 
ing with medicinal plants. This manuscript is illustrated by 
drawings which in some cases are remarkably accurate and 
beautiful. After the invention of printing, many of the works 
which had previously existed only in manuscript form were 
put into type cotemporaneously with books actually written 
at the time. Consequently the so-called incunabula of the fif- 
teenth century are far older as regards the matter they con- 
tain than the date of their publication would seem to indicate. 
The library of the Missouri Botanical Garden is particularly 
fortunate in having a remarkably complete collection of nat- 
ural histories and medical botanies printed before the time of 
Linnaeus. These works are of the utmost value in tracing the 
history of plants, but they likewise throw considerable light 
upon the development of science in general, particularly med- 
icine. Some of the more important of these pre-Linnaean pub- 
lications have been brought together in the old museum build- 
ing at the Garden and will be on exhibition during the meeting 
of the American Medical Association. Included in this exhibi- 
tion are the following works: 
1. Herbarius Latinus (also known as JTerbarius in Latino, 
Herbarius Moguntinus, Herbarius Patavinus, the Latin 
Herbarius, ete.), Meinz, 1848, by Peter Schoeffer, contains 
fifteen illustrated chapters on herbs and their virtues, as well 
as an index to ninety-six drugs. It is interesting to note that 
only thirty years previous to the publication of this work the 
first book from movable type was produced in the same town 
of Meinz. So far as known this is the only copy of the editio 
princeps in America. It is a larger copy than that in the 
