224 Conclusions [ch. 



covering only the comparatively short space of two hundred 

 years. There are, of course, a very large number of later 

 herbals, belonging to the end of the seventeenth, the 

 eighteenth, and even the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 

 but their importance in the history of botany appears to the 

 present writer to be relatively small, and hence, in this 

 volume, attention has been almost entirely confined to works 

 which appeared before 1670. 



After this period, botany rapidly became more scientific ; 

 the discovery of the function of the stamens, which was 

 first announced in 1682, marking a very definite step in 

 advance. As time went on, the herbal, with its character- 

 istic mixture of medical and botanical lore, gave way before 

 the exclusively medical pharmacopoeia on the one hand, and 

 the exclusively bota.nica.1 Jlora on the other. As the use of 

 home-made remedies declined, and the chemist's shop took 

 the place of the housewife's herb-garden and still-room, the 

 practical value of the herbal diminished almost to vanishing 

 point. 



The best epoch in the history of the herbal, from the 

 point of view of book-illustration, is confined within much 

 narrower limits than the two centuries we have been con- 

 sidering. The suggestion has been made, and seems 

 thoroughly justified, that the finest period should be reckoned 

 as falling between 1530 and 16 14, that is, between the 

 wood-cuts of Hans Weiditz in Brunfels' ' Herbarum vivae 

 eicones,' and the copper-plates of Crispian de Passe in the 

 ' Hortus Floridus.' This good period thus lasted less than 

 one hundred years, and belongs chiefly to the sixteenth 

 century. From the artistic point of view, its zenith is 

 perhaps reached in the wood-engravings which illustrate 

 Fuchs' great work, ' De historia stirpium ' (1542), though, 

 from a more strictly scientific standpoint, the drawings by 

 Camerarius and Gesner, which appeared in 1586 and 1588, 

 may be said to bear the palm. 



As far as the text is concerned, the culmination of the 

 botanical works of the period under consideration may be 

 regarded as foreshadowed in the 'Stirpium Adversaria 

 Nova' of Pena and de I'Obel (1570 — 71) and attained 

 in the ' Prodromos ' (1620) and the 'Pinax' (1623) of 

 Gaspard Bauhin. In the works of the latter author, 



