THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 51 



sisters. The Arabs did a little original work, but Western Europe 

 drew any slight knowledge it could boast of from Dioscorides. 

 The inveniion of the art of printing, the discovery of America, 

 and the circumnavigation of Afric:i, at the end of the fifteenth 

 century, and the great religious upheaval at the beginning of the 

 sixteenth century, roused the mental energies of the European 

 nations in a remarkable degree. The study of botany shared in 

 the benefits of this new civilization. Italy, as the more direct 

 heir of Roman culture, had of course naturally maintained the 

 first place as the seat of learning. Dante gave his immortal 

 works to the world before any poet of equal genius appeared in 

 other parts of Western Europe ; to the exertions of his two 

 worthy successors, Petrarca and Boccaccio, we owe, no doubt, 

 the preservation of a great deal of Greek and Roman literature 

 till then buried in the archives of cloisters, and likely sooner or 

 later to be totally lost. Even the invasion of Europe by the 

 Turk had the one good influence that many of the exiled Greeks 

 sought a refuge in Italy, and brought with them a knowledge 

 of and a love for the writings of classical Greece. One of the 

 most prominent of these was Theodorus Gaza, v»'ho translated 

 the botanical works of Theophrastos into Latin, first printed in 

 1483. Henuolaus Barbaras was the first Italian who took up the 

 study of botany ; he translated Dioscorides and also published 

 Pliny's Natural History. 



A new era may, however, be said to have been inaugurated by 

 Otto Brunfels, inasmuch as we find in his work " Herbarium 

 Vivae Eicones," published in 1530 for the first time, figures of 

 plants drawn from nature. I am able to submit a copy for your 

 inspection of his three volumes bound in one. The first bears 

 the date of 1532, and is a reprint of the first edition. The 

 second has the year 1531 imprinted on the title page, and con- 

 tains, besides the writings of Brunfels himself, commentaries on 

 the first book by Bock, Fuchs, and others. The third volume 

 was published in 1536. Although the woodcuts are rough, they 

 are generally life-like in outline, as you will observe by comparing 

 them with some of our cultivated plants and introduced weeds 

 depicted therein — for instance, the Lily of the Valley of our gardens 

 on page 211 of vol. i,, and Anthemis cotida, fig. 255, vol. i., there 

 called Cotalafoelida, a plant which you find naturalized in the 

 neighbourhood of Melbourne. Although in modern botanical 

 books the works of Brunfels are no longer quoted, Sir James 

 Smith in his " English Flora" still refers to them, as well as to those 

 of Fuchs, Clusius, Ray, and many others about whom I shall say 

 a few words later on. Brunfels was born towards the end of the 

 i5lh century, in the neighbourhood of Mayence, as the son of a 

 simple tradesman, but received a good education and obtained 

 the degree of inagister artium. For several years he was a monk 



