viii PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 



living creatures." After liim came Dioscorides, in the time of 

 Anthony and Cleopatra, whose excellent work on plants and 

 the materia medica, edited and commented on by several 

 writers, hold its position imtil the seventeenth century as the 

 leading work on the subject. Pliny provided for the Romans, 

 in his renowned " Natural History," a cyclopaedia of universal 

 knowledge of the earth, about a third part of which is devoted 

 to plants. Pliny was said to be credulous ; he was certainly 

 industrious and gatliered a vast amount of iuformatiou, but, I 

 suppose, very few look into Pliny uow-a-days, and yet his 

 book contains many good things, and is the reverse of dry. 

 The works of these two men and of Galen, who lived not very 

 long after, supplied the botanical knowledge of Europe, except 

 a little rill that trickled in h-om Avicenna and the Arabians, 

 until about the sixteenth century, when a number of writers 

 appeared, but their works are almost entirely founded upon 

 the three above mentioned, except that of C^salpinus, who 

 took Theophrastus for his model. In England the honour 

 of the first work on Botany of any importance must be awarded 

 to Dr. Turner, whose "New Herball" was published in 1551, in 

 the reign of Edward the Sixth, and is dedicated " to the Duke 

 of Somersette's grace." Turner is a quaint writer; he says, for 

 instance: "Leopard's Bayne layd to a Scorpione maketh 

 hyr utterly amazed and mum." Who would not carry a sprig 

 of such an admirable remedy for " irresponsible chatterers ?" 

 The book is in black-letter, well-printed, and is illustrated with 

 excellent outline engravings, which had, I believe, appeared 

 before in the works of Puchsius, published at Basle. The 

 name of Fuchs has become a garden, if not a household word, 

 in Fuchsia ; and old Fox — for that would be his name in our 

 vernacular — might be amazed that he also fm-nishes a 

 patronymic for the intensely powerful aniline dye Fuchsine. 



A pleasant paper might be written on those hne old folios, 

 Gerarde's "Herbal" and Parkinson's " Theatrum Botanicum, 

 or Theater of Plants," which appeared in the next centm-y. 

 Folios are out of date now except with book collectors who buy 



