AN OLD HERBAL 27 



to remember that this fame even extended to our shores, 

 for later on there was published in London a little work 

 of instructions against the plague, entitled " A worthy 

 practise of the moste learned Phisition Maister Leonerd 

 Fuchsius, Doctor in Phisicke, most necessary in this 

 needfull tyme of our visitation, for the comforte of all 

 good and faythfull people, both olde and yonge, both 

 for the sicke and for them that woulde avoyde the 

 daunger of contagion." In the year 1535 he was 

 appointed to a professorship at the University of 

 Tubingen, which had just adopted the Reformed Faith, 

 and there he remained until his death in 1566. In spite 

 of his untiring activity, alike as a professor and as a 

 physician, he yet found time for botanical studies, and 

 in 1542 his great Latin Herbal appeared from the well- 

 known printing-press of Michael Isingrin of Basle. It 

 was followed in the succeeding year by a German 

 edition, also in folio, and with the same woodcuts, over 

 500 in number, of which about 400 are illustrations of 

 indigenous German plants and 100 of foreign species. 

 Shortly afterwards, in 1545, Isingrin printed an octavo 

 edition of the Herbal with the same illustrations on a 

 reduced scale. It is interesting to call to mind that, in 

 honour of our botanist, the name of Fuchsia has been 

 given to one of the handsomest of garden flowers. 



No doubt it is the beauty of the illustrations that has 

 rendered Fuchs' Herbal so justly famous. Indeed 

 their superlative merit is generally recognised. " Fuchs' 

 splendid figures," says Professor Von Sachs, " remain 

 unsurpassed." " They represent," writes Mrs Agnes 

 Arber, in her fascinating book on Herbals, "the high- 

 water mark of that type of botanical drawing which 

 seeks to express the individual character and habit of 



