XXVI INTRODUCTION. 



a work which is enriched with the new 

 knowledge but conservative of the old 

 tone : I mean Gerarde's Herhall. This 

 popular, quaint, engaging book^ which 

 (rather than Dr. Turner's) is the parent of 

 all succeeding books that bear the name 

 of Herbal, was published in 1597; and is 

 sufficiently remarkable to justify a short 

 digression. 



The great work of Dioscorides may be 

 regarded as a Herbal, and it would not be 

 unjust to distinguish it by this title from 

 the more philosophic and comprehensive 

 writing of Theophrastus. But it is the 

 Herbal of a great physician, and a man 

 of scientific instincts. In the Herbarium 

 of Apuleius the utilitarian character is 

 the whole ; and it is this book that re- 

 presents to us the position of Botany for 

 many centuries as the mere herb-picker 

 to Medicine. True the race of learned 

 physicians never died utterly out; and their 

 text-book was still Dioscorides, mostly 

 in a Latin or an Arabic translation. But 

 the mass of practitioners knew only their 

 Herbarium, and that mostly in a degene- 



