1862.] CHAPTERS ON BRITISH BOTANY. 205 



situations he specified." This is a remark which might be made 

 about some of Ray's own localities, and probably about those of 

 every local botanist; for plants are sometimes nearly, if not 

 quite extirpated ; sometimes the very locality is so changed that 

 certain species cannot possibly grow in places where they once 

 flourished in abundance. 



Johnson, the editor of the emaculate edition of Gerard, says, 

 "Lobel and Pena's figures are verysmall and imperfecte, by reason 

 (I conjecture) they were taken from dried plants." This is re- 

 peated by Dr. Pulteney in these words : — " Lobel's own figures 

 arc small and insufficient in many cases to express the habit of 

 the plant, the delineation of which was almost the extent of the 

 efforts of those days." We cannot ascertain exactly what figures 

 are Lobel's own ; but if the figures of the two forms of the com- 

 mon Valerian have been borrowed by Lobel, Clusius, Gerard, 

 Johnson, and Parkinson have not scrupled to follow his example. 

 These eminent contemporaries and successors have imitated his 

 cuts as accurately as could have been done by a photographic 

 apparatus. Most of his figures are as large as those common in 

 his time, and no marvel, for one set of engraved blocks might 

 have supplied all the botanists of Europe during the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries. They Avere all probably made at one 

 burin. 



The historian of the progress of Botany in England, states that 

 Lobel died in 1616, aged seventy-eight, and he also enters a little 

 bit of scandal about the peevishness and morosity of our early 

 English botanist, who felt the infirmities of age in his temper as 

 in his aged limbs. He was probably soured by disappointment. 

 See Pulteney's Sketches, vol. i. p. 105, and also the preface 

 to a work which Lobel began, and which was never finished, 

 viz. ' Illustrationes Plantarum.' 



Lobel was born in 1538, and died, as stated above, in 1616, 

 in a good old age; and posterity has recognized and immortalized 

 his memory in the genus Lobelia, which contains a great number 

 of very useful and ornamental plants, most of which grow in a 

 warmer climate than our own. We have two British species. 



Of good old Gerard very little is to be gleaned from contem- 

 porai-y history. We only know that he was born at Nantwich, 

 Cheshire, in 1545, and was educated for the medical profession. 

 All our early botanists were in some way or other connected with 

 the iEsculapian school. 



