312 



Mycologia 



Technical difficulties were no less obstructive. The only 

 means at the disposal of the early herbalists was wood-engraving, 

 and_that art had only just reached the stage where a black line 

 instead of a white one was produced in printing. Colored repro- 

 ductions were entirely out of the question, as only some crude 

 Italian prints from wood-blocks — initial letters, and the like — 

 were known. There were no scientific artists in those days. The 

 authors employed ordinary artists ; and artists, as you may have 

 learned from contact with them, are constitutionally opposed to 

 being held down by plain, unadorned facts. Even Leonardo da 

 Vinci, certainly a scientific man, as well as one of the greatest 

 artists, could not resist giving an ornamental twist to his draw- 

 ings of plants, drawings which, doubtless, were done for their 

 botanic interest alone. 



Let us outline chronologically the development -of the principal 

 technical means as employed by the mycologists in illustrating 

 their works, from Clusius (1601) to Boudier (1905&). 



The first period, that in which wood-engraving was the chief 

 means of illustrating, embraces the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 

 turies. The wood-engraving practised by the artists of the 

 herbalists was, as already indicated, a crude, black-line engraving. 

 An outline-drawing was transferred to the smooth wood-block. 

 With sharp instruments the surface was cut away everywhere 

 except under the lines of the drawing. When completed, the 

 block was held for printing as if it were type. In a more com- 

 plex, shade-rendering form, in which white- and black-line en- 

 graving are intermingled, this ancient and most serviceable art 

 persisted until displaced by the modern half-tone, some time in 

 the early nineties of the last century. 



The second period, in which steel- and copper-engraving played 

 the principal role in mycological book-illustration, began late in 

 the seventeenth century and lasted until well into the nineteenth. 2 

 In method of procedure it resembled the white-line engraving of 

 the wood-engravers. The highly polished metal plate was cut 

 into with suitable instruments to raise what is technically known 



; 2 As a means of artistic expression, it was used as early as the fifteenth 

 century. 



