When we come to consider the origin of the herbal, we find that it is impossible to assign any date for its beginning. In manuscript form, herbals have existed from very early times, but, in the present book, those prior to the invention of printing have been scarcely touched upon. Our subject has been limited to the most active life-period of the printed herbal, which may be reckoned as beginning in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, with the ‘Book of Nature,’ the ‘Herbarium’ of Apuleius, and the Latin and German ‘Herbarius.’ When this active period ended is less easily decided, but in some senses it may fairly be taken as covering only the comparatively short space of two hundred years. There are, of course, a very large number of later herbals, belonging to the end of the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and even the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but their importance in the history of botany appears to the present writer to be relatively small, and hence, in this volume, attention has been almost entirely confined to works which appeared before 1670.
After this period, botany rapidly became more scientific; the discovery of the function of the stamens, which was first announced in 1682, marking a very definite step in advance. As time went on, the herbal, with its characteristic mixture of medical and botanical lore, gave way before the exclusively medical pharmacopœia on the one hand, and the exclusively botanical flora on the other. As the use of home-made remedies declined, and the chemist’s shop took the place of the housewife’s herb-garden and still-room, the practical value of the herbal diminished almost to vanishing point.
The best epoch in the history of the herbal, from the point of view of book-illustration, is confined within much narrower limits than the two centuries we have been considering. The suggestion has been made, and seems thoroughly justified, that the finest period should be reckoned as falling between 1530 and 1614, that is, between the wood-cuts of Hans Weiditz in Brunfels’ ‘Herbarum vivæ eicones,’ and the copper-plates of Crispian de Passe in the ‘Hortus Floridus.’ This good period thus lasted less than one hundred years, and belongs chiefly to the sixteenth century. From the artistic point of view, its zenith is perhaps reached in the wood-engravings which illustrate Fuchs’ great work, ‘De historia stirpium’ (1542), though, from a more strictly scientific standpoint, the drawings by Camerarius and Gesner, which appeared in 1586 and 1588, may be said to bear the palm.
Text-fig. 113. A Herbalist’s Garden and Store-room [Das Kreüterbůch oder Herbarius. Printed by Heinrich Stayner, Augsburg, 1534].
As far as the text is concerned, the culmination of the botanical works of the period under consideration may be regarded as foreshadowed in the ‘Stirpium Adversaria Nova’ of Pena and de l’Obel (1570-71) and attained in the ‘Prodromos’ (1620) and the ‘Pinax’ (1623) of Gaspard Bauhin. In the works of the latter author, classification, nomenclature and description reach their high-water mark, though it is to de l’Obel, and to his precursor, Bock, one of the “German Fathers of Botany,” that we owe the first definite efforts after a natural system. It is pleasant to remember that Jean Bauhin, to whom his younger brother Gaspard probably owed his first botanical inspiration, was a pupil of Leonhard Fuchs at Tübingen, so that the latter has a double claim to be associated with the results of the “herbal period” at its best. We began this book with a portrait of Leonhard Fuchs, and we may well conclude with his name—that of the greatest and most typical of sixteenth-century herbalists.