■tow VUfff. 



PREFACE 



The following accounts of some Botanists of the 

 Elizabethan and Jacobean age have gathered around the 

 literary remains of one who, but twelve years ago, was 

 introduced to us as ' A forgotten Botanist of the seven- 

 teenth Century'. By a strange hazard we can now come 

 closer to John Goodyer through his own writings than 

 to any of the contemporaries whose names have been 

 writ larger on the roll of the history of botany : and 

 through him, other botanists of distinction have been 

 made known, who otherwise would have remained in 

 almost total oblivion ; for as a modern authority has 

 recently discovered, * Every writer of the period owned 

 help from Goodyer in one way or another'.^ 



The Goodyer papers serve to illustrate missing chapters 



in the histories of Botany and Horticulture in that most 



interesting period of British Science, the hundred years 



which preceded the foundation of the Royal Society. 



Authors of standard histories of British Botany, largely 



based on German authority, have been apt to skim rapidly 



over this period, in which several of our countrymen were 



in some respects well abreast of Linnaeus. And these 



manuscripts with all the annotated books, which Goodyer 



bequeathed to Magdalen College in 1664, are probably 



the completest and most useful collection, for a study of 



English Botany that was not merely pre-Linnean, but was 



^pre-Morisonian and pre-Raian as well. 



22 In his scientific attitude of mind Goodyer was superior 



^to several of the first members of the Royal Society. 



^ 1 White, Bristol Flora, p. 57. 



