BAKER : FATHERS OF YORKSHIRE BOTANY. 1 89 



John Gerard was cotemporary with Lobel. He was a 

 native of Nantwich in Cheshire, and was born in 1545, and 

 educated as a surgeon. He settled in London and obtained 

 the patronage of the great Lord Burleigh, who at that time 

 possessed the finest garden in the country. In 1596, Gerard 

 published a list of the plants, nearly iioo in number, which he 

 had under cultivation in his own private garden in Holborn. 

 A second edition of this, pubhshed three years later, is dedica- 

 ted to Sir Walter Raleigh. His well-known ' Herbal, or 

 General History of Plants,' a huge volume in folio, was pub- 

 lished in 1597. It is founded on the Herbal of Dodonccus, and 

 illustrated by blocks which had been already used in Holland 

 by Taberncemontanus. Gerard's book, unlike those of Turner 

 and Lobel, was written in English and had a very wide circula- 

 tion. Thirty-six years later, in 1633, a new and much improved 

 edition of it was published by Thomas Johnson 



Thomas Johnson, who was a native of Selby in Yorkshire, 

 was the best botanist of his day. He became an apothecary in 

 London and had a shop upon Snow Hill. The Society of 

 Apothecaries was first incorporated in the early part of the 

 reign of James I, and very soon their annual herborising 

 became a regularly settled institution. Johnson's first publica- 

 tions give an account of two of their trips, one to Kent, in 1629, 

 and the second to Hampstead Heath, in 1632. These are 

 notable as being the first accounts of a botanical excursion 

 published in England. Two years later he published his 

 ' Mercurius Botanicus,' the result of a journey through Oxford 

 to Bath and Bristol, and home again by Southampton, the Isle 

 of Wight, and Guildford ; and in 1641 the account of a trip to 

 Wales. In 1633 he brought out his amended edition of 

 Gerard's Herball, a book which merits fully the encomium 

 bestowed upon it by the great Swiss naturalist, Haller : — 

 'Dignum opus ettotiusrei herbariae eo sevo notse compendium.' 

 It contains a notice of more than 800 plants not in Gerard's, 

 and upwards of 700 new figures in addition to Gerard's 2000. 

 Then the Civil War broke out and Johnson threw himself into 



