314 GARDEN LISTS 



Toadflax spread over England, where Goodyer learnt about a new 

 species of Elm, saw many other plants for the first time, and whence 

 he stocked his Hampshire garden at Droxford. 



Yeast and Beei-. 



If in 1515 so supreme a genius as Leonardo da Vinci did not 

 despise the petty details of the preparation of his national drink, 

 and wrote letters thereon deprecating a bad habit of making wine 

 in uncovered vessels, so that the essence escaped to the air during 

 fermentation, surely a scientific history of cultivators of plants 

 should take cognizance of the first advances in practical brewing. 

 •With the name of Coys may be associated some of the earliest 

 recorded experiments of an exact nature in what is the most 

 fundamental operation in the whole of Biochemistry — the production 

 of alcohol from malt. Beer has not always been the national drink 

 of the Englishman. Only a very few years before Coys' childhood, 

 an English author on Dyetary thought it necessary to define in 

 print what this new drink, beer, reall}- is. ' Bere is made of malte, 

 of hoppes, and water : it is a naturall drynke for a Dutche man. 

 And nowe of late dayes it is moche used in Englandc to the 

 detryment of many Englysshe men.' ^ 



The older recipes give hardly more detail than this.*^ Without 

 knowing of its existence as a plant William Coys had made a 

 detailed study of the culture of the Yeast plant, the results of which 

 he communicated to Lobel, who printed them in 1605.^ It is 

 clear that he knew from experience that a small rise or fall of 

 temperature would profoundly alter the working of yeast, and 

 that he introduced improvements in the brewing of beer. Coys 

 may not improbably have received his first lessons in the art 

 of brewing from persons who could recall a time when no hop- 

 brewed beer was made in England, for hops, it is believed, came to 

 England from Flanders on one and the same ship with ' peacocks 

 and heretics', or, more precisely, between 1520 and 1524. An 

 account of brewing as practised in France had recently been 

 published in 1600 in Surflet's translation of the Maison Rusiiquc 

 by Charles Stevens (Estienne), but the use of yeast is not as well 



' Boorde, Z^/M^r)', X. 256. 1542. 



* Possibly Dr. Walter Bayley's MS. entitled '' Explicatio Galeni de potu . . . 

 if/ praecipue de nostrae Alae ct Biriae paraiione, might be helpful, but though 

 said to have been in the Library of Robert, Earl of Aylesbury, it is not now 

 to be found' (D'A. Power). 



^ Lobcl, Adversaria pars altera, 1605, ]jp. 471-2. 



