Until of late no such an assured position could be rightly claimed by our native herbs, though pretentions in their favour have been widely popular since early English times. Indeed, Herbal physic has engaged the attention of many authors from the primitive days of Dioscorides (A.D. 60) to those of Elizabethan Gerard, whose exhaustive and delightful volume published in 1587 has remained ever since in paramount favour with the English people. Its quaint fascinating style, and its queer astrological notions, together with its admirable woodcuts of the plants described, have combined to make this comprehensive Herbal a standing favourite even to the present day. Gerard had a large physic-garden near his house in Old Bourne (Holborn), and there is in the British Museum a letter drawn up by his hand asking Lord Burghley, his patron, to advise the establishment by the University of Cambridge in their grounds of a Simpling Herbarium. Nevertheless, we are now told (H. Lee, 1883) that Gerard's "ponderous book is little more than a translation of Dodonoeus, from which comparatively un-read author whole chapters have been taken verbatim without acknowledgment." No English work on herbs and plants is met with prior to the sixteenth century. In 1552 all books on [8] astronomy and geography were ordered to be destroyed, because supposed to be infected with magic. And it is more than probable that any publications extant at that time on the virtues of herbs (then associated by many persons with witchcraft), underwent the same fate. In like manner King Hezekiah long ago "fearing lest the Herbals of Solomon should come into profane hands, caused them to be burned," as we learn from that "loyal and godly herbalist," Robert Turner. During the reigns of Edward the Sixth and Mary, Dr. William Bulleyn ranked high as a physician and botanist. He wrote the first _Boke of Simples_, which remains among the most interesting literary productions of that era as a record of his acuteness and learning. It advocates the exclusive employment of our native herbal medicines. Again, Nicholas Culpeper, "student in physick," whose name is still a household word with many a plain thinking English person, published in 1652, for the benefit of the Commonwealth, his "Compleat Method whereby a man may cure himself being sick, for threepence charge, with such things only as grow in England, they being most fit for English bodies." Likewise in 1696 the Honourable Richard Boyle, F.R.S., published "_A Collection of Choice, Safe, and Simple English Remedies_, easily prepared, very useful in families, and fitted for the service of country people."