This is a fair specimen of the manner in which the cuts in the Hortus Sanitatis are designed and executed. Among the most curious and best designed are: the interior of an apothecary’s shop, on the reverse of the first leaf; a monkey seated on the top of a fountain, in the chapter on water; a butcher cutting up meat; a man selling cheese at a stall; a woman milking a cow; and figures of the male and female mandrake. At chapter 119, “De Pediculo,” a woman is represented brushing the head of a boy with a peculiar kind of brush, which answers the purpose of a small-toothed comb; and she appears to bestow her labour on no infertile field, for each of her “sweepings,” which are seen lying on the floor, would scarcely slip through the teeth of a garden rake. Meydenbach’s edition has been supposed to be the first; and Linnæus, in the Bibliotheca Botanica, has ascribed the work to one John Cuba, a physician of Mentz; but other writers have doubted if this person were really the author. The first edition of this work, under the title of “Herbarus,” with a hundred and fifty wood-cuts, was printed at Mentz by Peter Scheffer in 1484; and in 1485 he printed an enlarged edition in German, containing three hundred and eighty cuts, under the title of “Ortus Sanitatis oder Garten der Gesundheit.” Of the work printed by Scheffer, Breydenbach is said to have been one of the compilers. Several editions of the Hortus Sanitatis were subsequently printed, not only in Germany, but in France, Holland, and Switzerland. [Illustration] Having previously expressed my opinion respecting the wood-cuts in the Nuremberg Chronicle, there will be less occasion to give a detailed account of the book and the rubbish it contains here: in speaking thus it may perhaps be necessary to say that this character is meant to apply to the wood-cuts and not to the literary portion of the work, which Thomas Hearne, of black-letter memory, pronounces to be extremely “pleasant, useful, and curious.” With the wood-cuts the Rev. Dr. Dibdin appears to have been equally charmed. The work called the “Nuremberg Chronicle” is a folio, compiled by Hartman Schedel, a physician of Nuremberg, and printed in that city by Anthony Koburger in 1493. In the colophon it is stated that the views of cities, and figures of eminent characters, were executed under the superintendence of Michael Wolgemuth and William Pleydenwurff, “mathematical men”[IV-54] and skilled in the art of painting. The total number of impressions contained in the work exceeds two thousand, but several of the cuts are repeated eight or ten times. The following fac-simile will afford an idea of the style in which the portraits of illustrious men contained in this often-cited chronicle are executed.