I would also record my thanks to Mr A. W. Pollard, Secretary of the Bibliographical Society, Prof. Killermann of Regensburg, Signorina Adelaide Marchi of Florence, Mr C. D. Sherborn of the British Museum (Natural History) and Dr B. Daydon Jackson, General Secretary of the Linnean Society, all of whom have kindly given me information of great value. For help in the translation of certain German and Latin texts, I am indebted to Mr E. G. Tucker, B.A., Mr F. A. Scholfield, M.A., and to my brother, Mr D. S. Robertson, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. I wish, further, to express my gratitude to my father for advice and suggestions. Without his help, I should scarcely have felt myself competent to discuss the subject from the artistic standpoint. To my husband, also, I owe many thanks for assistance in various directions, more particularly in criticising the manuscript, and in seeing the volume through the press. I am indebted to my sister, Miss Janet Robertson, for the cover, the design for which is based upon a wood-cut in the _Ortus Sanitatis_ of 1491. A book of this kind, in the preparation of which many previous works have been laid under contribution, is doubtless open to a certain criticism which William Turner, “the Father of British Botany,” anticipated in the case of his own writings. I think I cannot do better than proffer my excuse in the very words of this sixteenth-century herbalist: “For some of them will saye, seynge that I graunte that I have gathered this booke of so manye writers, that I offer unto you an heape of other mennis laboures, and nothinge of myne owne,... To whom I aunswere, that if the honye that the bees gather out of so manye floure of herbes, shrubbes, and trees, that are growing in other mennis medowes, feldes and closes: maye justelye be called the bees honye:... So maye I call it that I have learned and gathered of manye good autoures ... my booke.” AGNES ARBER. BALFOUR LABORATORY, CAMBRIDGE, _26th July, 1912_. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. THE EARLY HISTORY OF BOTANY 1. Introductory 1 2. Aristotelian Botany 2 3. Medicinal Botany 6 II. THE EARLIEST PRINTED HERBALS (FIFTEENTH CENTURY) 1. The Encyclopædia of Bartholomæus Anglicus and ‘The Book of Nature’ 10 2. The ‘Herbarium’ of Apuleius Platonicus 11 3. The Latin ‘Herbarius’ 16 4. The German ‘Herbarius’ and related Works 18 5. The ‘Hortus Sanitatis’ 25 III. THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE HERBAL IN ENGLAND 1. The ‘Herbarium’ of Apuleius Platonicus 35 2. Banckes’ Herbal 38