222 Conclusions [ch. 



which each plant should find its inevitable place, must 

 have been clear for instance to de l'Obel, when he wrote in 

 the ' Adversaria,' of "an order, than which nothing more 

 beautiful exists in the heavens, or in the mind of a wise 

 man 1 . 



Second only to the debt of botany to medicine is its debt 

 to certain branches of the fine arts, more especially wood- 

 engraving. The draughtsman and engraver not only dis- 

 seminated the knowledge of plants, but their work must 

 often have revealed to the botanist features which had 

 escaped his less highly educated and subtle eye. 



As we have already pointed out, the art of plant 

 description lagged conspicuously behind that of plant illus- 

 tration. The vague and crude, but often picturesque, 

 accounts, given by the early herbalists of the plants which 

 they observed, contrast curiously with the technically 

 accurate, but colourless and impersonal descriptions from 

 the pens of modern botanists. 



The rapid rise of botany, in the two centuries which we 

 have reviewed, must have been greatly stimulated by the 

 cosmopolitanism of the savants of the renaissance. Periods 

 of study at a succession of different universities, and wide 

 European travel, including visits to scientific men of various 

 countries, seem to have formed part of the recognised 

 equipment of the botanical student. Possibly the zeal for 

 travel was not altogether spontaneous, but was artificially 

 stimulated by the religious disturbances so common at the 

 period of the Reformation and later, which often drove into 

 exile the adherents of the Reformed Faith, among whom 

 many botanists were numbered. This is ^exemplified in 

 the cases of William Turner, Charles de l'Ecluse, and the 

 Bauhins. 



It is interesting to notice that, in the works of the best 

 herbalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such 

 for instance as Bock, Turner, Dodoens and Gaspard Bauhin, 

 we find, comparatively speaking, little belief in any kind of 

 superstition connected with plants, such as the doctrine of 

 signatures, or astrology. A number of books dealing with 

 such topics appeared during the period we have considered, 



1 "Sic enim ordine, quo nihil pulchrius in ccelo, aut in Sapientis animo,..." 



