HISTORY OF ESSEX BOTANV. 229 



PELECYPODA. 



EULA MM EL LIBRA NCHL4 TA . 

 Family — Cyre n i d ae . 

 Pisidium pusillum, Gmelin. ]. B. Coll. (W.H.D.) 



Specimens from John Brown's collection illustrating many 

 of the species which Mr. Dalton presented, were already in 

 the Club's series, and sets of many picked out from material 

 given by Mr. W. Whitaker, F.R.S., were arranged by the writer 

 when first he worked out the Club's Copford shells. 



HISTORY OF ESSEX BOTANY. 



By Prof. G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S., Vice-Presuient. 



Part 1. (continued from p. 184). 



The Botanists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth 

 Centuries. 



William How, or Howe, was born in London in 1620, 

 entered Merchant Taylor's School in 1632, and St. John's 

 College, Oxford, in 1637, graduating as B.A. in 1641, and 

 proceeding M.A. in 1644. He began the study of medicine, but 

 took up arms in the King's behalf, and was given the command 

 of a troop of horse. On the downfall of the royalist cause he 

 began to practice medicine in London, first in St. Lawrence 

 Lane, and afterwards in Milk Street, Cheapside ; but, though 

 commonly called Dr. How, he does not seem to have taken a 

 doctor's degree. He died at Milk Street, August 30th, 1656, and 

 was buried in the churchyard of St. Margaret's, Westminster, 

 leaving behind him, as Antony a Wood says, a "choice library of 

 books of his faculty, and the character of a noted herbalist." In 

 1650 he published anonymously Phytologia Bvitannica natales 

 exhibens indigenarnm Stivpium sponte emeygentium, in 134 pp., 8vo., 

 a work first attributed to him by Merret.'' This little work is 

 noteworthy as the first exclusively British flora ; but, though it 

 enumerates 1220 plants, mostly spermaphytes, it is far from 

 critically accurate, Ray enumerating more than thirty species 

 recorded in it which had no claim to be considered indigenous. 

 The Essex records in it are seven in number, viz. : — 



39 " Pinax, " l655 ; Epistola ad Lectorem A2. 



