LITERATURE AND SCIENCE OF ENGLAND. 49 



finally produced such splendid results. Wliile still a 

 resident of Bath, many of his more important obser- 

 vations were made. Here, it is said, he obtained the 

 first glimpse of the planet which bears his name ; and 

 here he constructed his first telescope, having been 

 led to consider the structure of that instiniment by 

 having accidentally broken the mirror of a reflecting 

 telescope which he had borrowed in this city. [17] 



In the department of botany, our old physician 

 Dr. Johnson is to be remembered as having published 

 the Herbal of Gerard, which long continued to be the 

 most popular and most complete work in that depart- 

 ment of natural history. In later and better times, 

 the work of Mr. Sole on the plants belonging to the 

 genus Mentha is supposed to have exhausted his 

 subject. But the name of Stackhouse stands eminent 

 among the cultivators of this attractive branch of 

 natural history, the translator of Theophrastus, and 

 the able delineator of the Fuci and other marine 

 plants found upon our shores, in the work to which 

 he gave the appropriate and classical title of Nereis 

 Britannica. Here, too, came to die the author of the 

 Flora Grceca^ Dr. Sibthorp, whose beautiful monu- 

 ment by Flaxman adorns the walls of the Abbey. 



Bath may justly be regarded as the cradle of 

 English Geology. This new science, indeed, may be 

 said to have had its birth in this place within our 

 E 



