HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 
calls it Cynosbatos. In Egyptian tombs dating from 100-300 a.d., 
Dr. Schweinfurth found several garlands of Roses, all belonging to one 
of the Gallicanae, probably Rosa sancta. In a Codex of Dioscorides, 
written and illustrated by a monk of Vienna in the year 512, there is 
a curious idealised picture of a shrub, with leaves and leaflets like those 
of a Rose, but with the inflorescence and fruits of a bramble. The 
original copy of this Codex is in the National Library at Vienna, but 
it has lately been reproduced in facsimile. No doubt it contains the 
oldest set of botanical drawings in existence. A full account of the 
Vienna manuscript, with an Anglo-Saxon translation, is given in 
Cockayne’s Ang/o-Saxon Leechdoms, published in the Rolls Series 
in 1864; and there is also a good account of it in Professor Daubeny’s 
Lectures on Roman Husbandry , with illustrations (Oxford, 1857). 
LATER PRE-LINNAEAN WRITERS 
The Persian poet Omar Khayyam, who flourished in the eleventh 
century, has much to say about Roses. A hip from a Rose planted 
on his grave at Nashipur was brought home by Mr. Simpson, the 
artist of The Illustrated London News. It was given to me by 
the late Mr. Bernard Quaritch, and reared at Kew. It proved to 
be Rosa damascena, and a shoot from the Kew plant has now been 
planted on the tomb of his first English translator, Edward Fitzgerald. 
The Roses which the Renaissance artists painted are always Rosa 
gallica or some of its varieties. There is in the Brera Gallery at Milan 
a fine picture by Luini, who flourished at the beginning of the reign 
of Henry VIII., of a Madonna and Child with a hedge of red roses 
behind them in full flower. Among the early English writers Chaucer 
had an unbounded admiration for the Rose ; the Eglantine he mentions 
is without doubt the Sweet Briar. Gower only mentions the Rose 
once ; Spenser thirty times ; and Shakespeare about a hundred 
times. According to Canon Ellacombe, the York and Lancaster 
Roses of the Temple brawl 1 and other places were Rosa versicolor of 
Clusius and Parkinson, referred to by the latter as the York and 
Lancaster Rose. 2 Dean Turner of Wells, the father of British 
botany, in his Herbal of 1551, gives an indefinite figure of a Rose, 
1 First Part of King Henry VI., Act ii. Scene 4. 
2 Paradisi in Sole Paradisns Terrestris, p. 414 (1629). 
