The resting place of this collection is a neat three-story house at 204
West Court street, rebuilt to serve as a library building. On the door
is a plate embossed with the name Lloyd, the patronymic of the brothers
in question. They are John Uri and Curtis Gates Lloyd. Every hour that
can be spent by these men from business or necessary recreation is spent
here. Mr. C. G. Lloyd devotes himself entirely to the study of botany and
connected subjects, while his brother is equally devoted to materia
medica, pharmacy, and chemistry.
In the botanical department are the best works obtainable in every
country, and there the study of botany may be carried to any height. In
point of age, some of them go back almost to the time when the art of
printing was discovered. Two copies of Aristotle are notable. A Greek
version bound in vellum was printed in 1584. Another, in parallel
columns of Greek and Latin, by Pacius, was published in 1607. Both are
in excellent preservation. A bibliographical rarity (two editions) is
the "Historia Plantarum," by Pinaeus, which was issued, one in 1561, the
other in 1567. It appears to have been a first attempt at the production
of colored plates. Plants that were rare at that time are colored by
hand, and then have a glossy fixative spread over them, causing the
colors still to be as bright and fresh as the day that the
three-hundred-years-dead workmen laid them on. Ranged in their sequence
are fifty volumes of the famous author, Linnaeus. Mr. Lloyd has a very
complete list of the Linnaean works, and his commissioners in Europe and
America are looking out for the missing volumes. An extremely odd work
is the book of Dr. Josselyn, entitled "New England Rarities," in which
the Puritan author discusses wisely on "byrds, beastes and fishes" of
the New World. Dr. Carolus Plumierus, a French savant, who flourished in
1762, contributes an exhaustive work on the "Flora of the Antilles." He
is antedated many years, however, by Dr. John Clayton, who is termed
Johannes Claytonus, and Dr. John Frederick Gronovius. These gentlemen
collated a work entitled the "Flora of Virginia," which is among the
first descriptions of botany in the United States. Two venerable works
are those of Mattioli, an Italian writer, who gave his knowledge to the
world in 1586, and Levinus Lemnius, who wrote "De Miraculis Occultis
Naturae" in 1628. The father of modern systematized botany is conceded to
be Mons. J. P. Tournefort, whose comprehensive work was published in
1719. It is the fortune of Mr. Lloyd to possess an original edition in
good condition. His "Histoire des Plantes," Paris (1698), is also on the
shelves. In the modern department of the library are the leading French
and German works. Spanish and Italian authors are also on the shelves,
the Lloyd collection of Spanish flora being among the best extant.
Twenty-two volumes of rice paper, bound in bright yellow and stitched in
silk, contain the flora of Japan. All the leaves are delicately tinted
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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