INTRODUCTION TO BOTANY. 
J1 
Glanville, and others now almost forgotten, the mixture of 
truth and falsehood is at least in equal parts, as the authors 
wrote down whatever they found in others, without exer- 
cising any critical acumen to distinguish the truth. 
A book under the name of Macer’s Herbal seems also 
to have been common in England before the invention of 
printing. Ovid praises the poetry of Macer, a medical 
writer on herbs ; but as it is impossible he could mean the 
barbarous leonine verses in which this book, De Naturis, 
Qualitatibus, et Virtutibus Herbarum, are written, it is 
generally allowed to be a pseudonymous work, and accord- 
ingly it is ascribed by some to Odo, or Odobonus, said to 
have been a French physician. It was translated into 
English by Mr. John Lelamar, the master of Hertford 
School, who lived about the year 1373. At the first in- 
vention of printing two editions of it were published, and 
it is surprising that so paltry a work, which treats only of 
88 plants, should have been translated or commented upon 
by the great Dr. Linacre, one of the medical ornaments of 
the reign of Henry the Eighth, and who obtained from 
that monarch the establishment of the College of Phy- 
sicians. 
While these inferior works engrossed the public atten- 
tion, the writings of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny, 
the true fathers of natural history, and in particular of 
botany, were utterly neglected, and indeed scarcely known. 
It was not until 1468, or the year after, that Pliny’s 
History of Nature was first printed ; and from this author 
Isidore and Platearius was speedily compiled, a German 
work with the title of The Book of Nature, which treats 
of animals and plants; of which latter 176 kinds are no- 
ticed, and many of them figured. This work is supposed 
by Seguier to be the first book on plants with wood-cuts : it 
was published between the years 14-75 and 1478. 
As the Greek language was but little understood in 
Western Europe, till the conquest of Constantinople by a 
people of a different religion drove the Greeks into Italy ; 
and as this emigration was speedily followed by the inven- 
tion of printing, the learned emigrants, who were obliged 
to exert themselves to maintain their former station in so- 
ciety, endeavoured to render the Greek authors fashionable 
in the West. 
Of the Greek naturalists, Dioscorides was the first 
printed, with a Latin translation by Barbarus, a Venetian no- 
bleman, who died at the early age of 29. This work was 
