HERTFORDSHIRE NATURALISTS AND THEIR WORK. 
79 
observed by the English editor. Here we find mention of a round 
dozen Herts plants, and they possess a peculiar local interest from 
nearly all having been noted “between Bushie and Watford,” with 
two at St. Albans and one at Hatfield. Gerard died in 1611, but 
his great work was re-edited and corrected by Dr. Thomas Johnson 
in 1633, and reprinted in 1636. Johnson added nothing to our 
records himself, but the Rev. Robert Abbot sent him a specimen 
of the bee-orchis from Hatfield. I cannot find anything more 
about the man than this solitary fact. 
It would have been interesting had we been able to claim 
the illustrious Francis Bacon, 1st Baron Verulam and Viscount 
St. Albans, as having added even a single line to our records. 
I have recently again gone through his 4 Sylva sylvarum,’ centuries 
6-8, in which he discourses of plants, but these sections are to 
a naturalist very unsatisfactory reading: they form a vast collection 
of all the sayings about plants and plant-growth he had read or 
heard, many paragraphs beginning “It is reported,” followed 
by some attempt to account for the phenomena cited by the 
philosophical conceits of his day; suggestions for new experiments 
and the like abound, but not a shred of the shrewd remarks which 
are everywhere present in the pages of the actual observers, such 
as Turner, Gerard, Ray, Parkinson, and many other smaller men. 
Bacon was a distinguished resident in our county, but as regards our 
plants they might never have existed so far as they receive mention 
in his pages. Garden flowers attracted his attention, but the weeds 
of the wood and wayside were of but little interest to him. 
Before leaving this topic I may give one specimen of the 
character of the book under notice— 
“ There is an old Tradition, that Boughs of Oake, put into the 
Earth, will put forth Wilde Vines; Which if it be true (no doubt) 
it is not the Oake that turneth into a Vine, but the Oake Bough 
Putrifying, qualifieth the Earth, to put forth a Vine of it selfe.” 
(‘ Sylva Sylvarum,’ cent, vi, p. 131.) I will refer to this later. 
John Parkinson has earned a name of a somewhat different 
kind to Gerard. He also issued two books, but his first volume 
was devoted to an account of garden plants in the many florists’ 
varieties, which has caused his 4 Paradisus terrestris ’ not only 
to be reprinted less than thirty years after its first publication, 
but also to attain the happy fate of being about to be reissued 
in facsimile within our own days. It owes this distinction to the 
taste for the yarieties of the Narcissus, which Parkinson not only 
cultivated but also illustrated and described; and this modern 
taste caused the old copies to become so much sought after that 
