18 INTRODUCTION TO BOTANY. 
which has ever been one of the favourite resorts of the 
London botanists. His great work was a new edition of 
Gerarde’s Herbal, with numerous additional articles, by 
which it included in all 2850 plants, with 2730 figures. 
As this work included foreign plants as well as native ones, 
he published, in the next year, his “ Mercurius Botani- 
cus,” which exhibited a list of the plants he found ina 
botanical excursion to the west of England; so that he 
was the first author who began to distinguish the native 
plants from the others. 
Parkinson published his ‘* Paradisus,” or Flower and 
Fruit Garden, in 1629, a work which shows, that at this 
time the gardens of our forefathers were far better stocked 
than we imagine. His profession of an apothecary, or, as 
it is now called, that of a chemist and druggist, taking up 
much of his time, and the time necessary for cutting a new 
set of figures, delayed the publication of his general his- 
tory, or Theatre of Plants, which is more extensive than 
those of Gerarde or Johnson, as it contains 3800 plants, 
with 2786 figures. The descriptions are new, and the 
whole has a true botanical cast, whereas both Gerarde and 
Johnson were intended more for mere medical use. 
_ The reign of the second Charles was extremely favour- 
able to the knowledge of plants. Gardening and planting 
were in high vogue, and among the authors in this depart- 
ment Evelyn stands pre-eminent: in 1658 he published his 
French Gardener; in 1664 his Sylva, or Treatise on 
Forest-trees, to which his Kalendarium Hortense, the first 
specimen of this kind, was annexed as an appendix; and 
in a fourth edition he also added Pomona, or a Treatise on 
Fruit-trees; in 1675 his Terra, or a Philosophical Dis- 
course on Earth. But this reign is still more remarkable 
for the attention paid to British botany. In 1650 Dr. How 
made the first attempt to give, in his Phytologia, a com- 
plete list of the British plants, of which he enumerated 
1220. A still larger list was afterwards given by Dr. Mer- 
rett, in his Pinax, published in 1667;. a very useful work, 
which included not only 1400 British plants, but also 
mentioned the animals and minerals then known to be 
produced in these islands. Three years. afterwards the 
celebrated Ray, who had already entered upon his career 
of natural history, by publishing, in 1660, his Catalogus 
Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium, extended his~ 
Catalogue to a general one of the British islands, and 
enumerated only 1050 species, rejecting many of those 
8 
> 
