APPENDIX. 219 



cast downe with any extreme gale of winde." He frequently 

 mentions different English counties which he seems to have 

 visited ; but it is somewhat curious that we should know so 

 little of such a well-known man; and it is no slight credit 

 to his ' Herbal' that it alone should have preserved Gerard's 

 name to us as a " household w^ord." We know nothing of 

 his private life, whether he was married or single, whether 

 he was wealth}^, or in fairly good circumstances, or poor, 

 except by conjecture. Even the time of his death was set 

 down incorrectly by Johnson, and has been repeated ever 

 since. The writer of the article in the * Journal of Horti- 

 culture,' which has been already mentioned, says : — " All 

 who have written about him state that he died in 1607. As 

 he lived and died in Holborn, it would have been easy to 

 consult the registers of St. Andrew's Church, in that parish ; 

 but no one ever did until — within a few days of my writing 

 this — I turned over the parchment leaves of those well-kept 

 registers, and in them found this entry: — "Mr. John Gerrard, 

 freeman of the Barber- Chirurgeons, buried the xviii. February, 

 1611." That would have been 1612, had the year then, as 

 now, commenced in January. 



Gerard was evidently a parishioner of consideration, for 

 he is the only one in that and other years with the prefix of 

 " Mr." All others have, at the most, merely their christian 

 and surnames recorded, whilst too many have such a totally 

 useless record, as " A poor man," or '* A maid from John 

 Smith's, buried this day." 



Thomas Johnson.* 



Johnson, as a botanist, is especially remarkable for in- 

 troducing the useful plan of carefully examining the Floras 

 of small districts, and next for his new and much enlarged 

 edition of Gerard's ' Historic of Plants.' He published a 

 ■''• See ' Flora of Middlesex.' 



