292 Aster History; BARTHOLOMAEUS 
soms of lilies, roses and violets, especially for wreaths of noble 
worth, to be made beautiful by them.” The culture of garden 
plants and trees, like the almond,* was of great interest to Bar- 
tholomaeus, and in his chapters on the rose and the lily, after 
speaking of their primacy among flowers, he shows his great 
interest in their cultivation by the length to which he describes the 
effects of pruning and forcing, remarking of the “ Agvestis rosa “ 
that cultivation produces in that wild rose more frequent mutations 
than in the rosa vera of the garden.t The rose is on the whole 
the first of flowers to him, “Flos rose { inter flores optinet? 
principatum,” its “multitudo”’ of flowers charms his eye, and its 
medical value his mind, observing ‘‘the rose is a tree which is 
medicinal from flower, to leaf, to seed.” 
LI. Vincent DE BEAUVAIS 
Vincent de Beauvais, or Vincentius Bellovacensis, was the latest 
and most copious of the three great contemporary encyclopaedists. 
Sprengel calls him “the Pliny of the middle ages, a bookish man, 
and one who quoted nothing except on authority.’ He is said to 
have been a Dominican monk and a bishop, and to have died 
1264; was from Beauvais in the department of Oise ; his great 
“Speculum naturale ” is one of the three parts § of his encyclopae- 
dia || the “Speculum majus tripartitum,” printed first and best by 
Mentelin, Strasburg, 1473-6, in 33 books, || six of which treat of 
plants ; his sources being the Bible, the Church fathers, and toa 
less degree the Greek, Latin and Arabic writers, including Dios 
tiga i: 
* Saying ‘‘ Amigdalas Grecum est que Nux longa vocatur. Hanc Nets 
vocant quasi minorem nucem; unde de qua virgi,’’ quoting from Ysidorus, < 
quoting its culture from Platearius ; see supra. i 
} Remarking that when the ‘* Rosa silvestris’? is planted in the gardens od 
vated, it is with it just as with the grape vine ; if itremains neglected and is aot RS 
from its superfluities (pruned) it degenerates into the wild.”’ 
t For rosae and obdtinet, 
@A fourth part, the Speculum morale, attributed to him, is a late 
er. 
| “The enormous necyclopaedia, in which he says the mandragora has the neo 
ofa human body ; the Scythian lamb is an animal plant attached to earth by stem ez 
roots; the tree of life or weeping tree is still to be found in Eastern harems,”’ Le 
—all of which are the familiar mediaeval fables with which monks could then pee 
books if they would avoid the contemporary imprisonment of Roger Bacon par 
r addition. — 
