n6 The Botanical Renaissance [ch. 



his description is enlivened with a picture of an embalmed 

 corpse. 



The illustrations to the Theatrum Botanicum are of no 

 importance, being chiefly copied from those of Gerard. 



The great British botanists who follow next upon 

 Parkinson, in point of time, are Robert Morison (b. 1620) 

 and John Ray (b. 1627), but as their chief works appeared 

 after the close of the period selected for special study in 

 this book (1470 — 1670), and as they were botanists in the 

 modern sense, rather than herbalists, we will not attempt 

 any discussion of their writings. 



While Morison and Ray were advancing the subject 

 of Systematic Botany, Nehemiah Grew and the Italian, 

 Marcello Malpighi, born respectively in 1641 and 1628, 

 were laying the foundations of the science of Plant Anatomy. 

 Their work, also, is outside the scope of the present book, 

 and it is only mentioned at this point in order to show that 

 the latter part of the seventeenth century witnessed a 

 considerable revolution in the science. From this period 

 onwards, with the opening up of new lines of inquiry, the 

 importance of the herbal steadily declined, and though books 

 which come under this heading were produced even in 

 the nineteenth century, the day of their pre-eminence was 

 over. 



7. The Revival of Aristotelian Botany. 



The subject of Aristotelian botany scarcely comes 

 within the scope of a book on Herbals, but, at the same 

 time, it cannot be sharply separated from the botany of the 

 herbalists. It therefore seems desirable to make a brief 

 reference at this point to its chief sixteenth-century ex- 

 ponent, the Italian savant, Andrea Cesalpino (1519 — 1603), 

 and to one or two other writers whose point of view was 

 similar. We have already shown that, in the Middle Ages, 

 Albertus Magnus carried on the tradition of Aristotle and 

 Theophrastus. At the time of the Renaissance, there was 

 again a revival of this aspect of the study, as well as of the 

 branch with which we are here more immediately concerned, 

 that, namely, which deals with plants from the standpoint 



