HISTORY OF ESSEX BOTANY. 



179 



With reference to subsequent accusations it is necessary to 

 mention that Parkinson says, on the title-page of the Theatrnm, 

 that " the chiefe notes of Dr. Lobel, Dr. Bonham, and others " 

 are " inserted therein "' ; and, on p. 1060 of the same work, that 

 certain matter " he prevented by death faiHng to perform it, I 

 have by purchasing his Workes with my money here supplied." 

 As we know Lobel to have visited Coys and have little clue to 

 Parkinson's being in the county, it is possible that all these 

 Essex records may belong to Lobel, as do others not published 

 until 1655 when Dr. How, whose Phytologia had appeared five 

 years previously, issued the fragment known as Lobel's 

 Illnstvationes. 



Though chronologically Lobel should have been mentioned 

 earlier, we may insert a short account of him here. Born at 

 Lille, in Flanders, in 1538, the son of Jean de Lobel, a lawyer, 

 and early acquiring a taste for botany, he matriculated in the 

 faculty of medicine at Montpellier 22 May, 1565, choosing 

 Rondelet, Regius Professor of Medicine "pro parente." Here he 

 made the acquaintance of Pierre Pena, a Provencal who had 

 matriculated in the same faculty a few weeks before, but was 

 probably Lobel's senior. Rondelet dying the following year 

 bequeathed his botanical manuscripts to Lobel and the two 

 fellow-students came to England. Here in 1571 they published 

 Stirpium Adversaria . . . authorihus Pctro Pena et Mathia de 

 Lobel Med ids,'" a work of great importance, containing, says 

 Pulteney,^- " the first sketch, rude as it is, of a natural method of 

 arrangement." 



Pena seems soon afterwards to have abandoned botany, 

 becoming Secret Ph3'sician to Henri HL, and dying worth more 

 than 600,000 livres ! In 1576 Lobel published, through Plantin, 

 the great Antwerp printer, Observatioiies, with i486 illustrations, 

 Plantin buying 800 copies of the Adversaria from the London 

 printer Thomas Purfoot for 1200 florins and binding them at the 

 end of the Observationes with the new joint title Plantarum sen 

 Stirpium Histnria MatthicB de Lobel Insulani and a new title-page. 

 For this work Philip II. in 1577 decreed to Lobel a recompense 

 of 50 livres and in 1581 the whole was published in Dutch, with 



31 In his Guide to the Literature of Botany (iSSi), p. xxxL, Mr. B. D. Jackson wrote of 

 Pena as Lobel's '• shadowy colleague." Since then M. Ludovic Legr^, in his Pierre Pena et 

 Mathias de Lobel (Marseilles, iSyg), has thrown a flood of li^ht upon this "shadowy" 

 personality, showing that most of the continental travel previous to 1565 alluded to in their 

 joint work was Pcna's and that his name, though subsequently dropped by Lobel, probably 

 came first on the title-page as that ot the senior and chief author. The dedication is dated 

 Christmas Eve, 1570; the colophon January ist, 1371. 



32 Historical . . . Sketches, i., p. loi. 



