Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/70

66 Nearly thirty years later, Henry Lyte translated into English the famous Dutch 'Herbal' of Dodoens. Lyte was an Oxford student who traveled in foreign lands and collected a number of rare plants, and on his return to England founded one of the first botanical gardens in this country. The title of his translation is 'A niewe Herball, or Historie of Plantes: wherein is contayned the whole discourse and perfect description of all sortes of Herbes and Plantes; their divers and sundry kindes: their straunge Figures, Fashions, and Shapes: their Names, Natures, Operations, and Vertues.' The book is most beautifully illustrated, and contains the records of some capital pieces of observation, but it is startling every now and then to meet with statements like this, 'Alysson hanged in the house, or at the gate, or entry, keepeth both man and beast from enchantments, or witching,' and 'The seede of the garden Larckes spurre dronken is very good agaynst the stinging of Scorpions, and indeede his virtue is so great against their poyson, that the herbe throwen before the Scorpions, doth cause them to be without force or power to do hurte, so that they may not move or sturre, until this herbe be taken from them.'

At the very end of the sixteenth century appeared the best known of all the herbals, that of 'John Gerarde, of London, Master in Chirurgerie.' Gerarde seems to have been an unscrupulous plagiarist, for he bases his herbal, quite without acknowledgment, on Priest's translation of Dodoens's collected works. Also of his eighteen hundred wood-cuts, less than twenty are original! So, altogether, his great reputation seems to have been built on somewhat frail foundations. Still he appears to have been a first-rate botanist, and in his garden in Holborn he cultivated more than a thousand different kinds of plants. I can not help thinking how delighted he would have been with a modern botanic garden, and particularly with one of the modern collections of insectivorous plants. For he gives a little figure of Sarracenia, the pitcher plant, copied from Clusius, who says he received the drawing with one dried leaf from an apothecary of Paris, who himself received it from Lisbon. Gerarde reproduces the figure 'for the strangeness thereof,' and in the 'hope that some or other that travell into forraine parts may finde this elegant plant, and know it b) this small expression, and bring it home with them, that so we may come to a perfecter knowledge thereof.'

Later on the fashion set in of leavening botany with astrology. The best known exponents of this kind* of pseudo-science are Culpeper and Turner. Nicholas Culpeper seems to have been afflicted with boundless self-conceit; the following is a sample of his bombastic style: "To find out the Reason of the operation of Herbs, Plants, etc., by the Stars went I, and herein I could find but few Authors, but those as full of nonsense and contradiction as an egg is full of meat; this not being pleasing, and less profitable to me, I consulted with my two Brothers, Dr. Reason, and Dr. Experience, and took a voyage to visit