The wood-cuts which illustrate Fuchs’ herbal are of extraordinary beauty (Text-figs. 30, 31, 32, 58, 70, 86, 87, 88). Some of them gain a special interest as being the first European figures of certain American plants, e.g. Indian Corn (_Zea mais_ L.) and the Great Pumpkin (_Cucurbita maxima_ Duch.) (Text-fig. 32). These wood-cuts became familiar in England in the second half of the sixteenth century, being used on a reduced scale (borrowed from the octavo edition) in both William Turner’s herbal and Lyte’s Dodoens, two books which we shall consider a little later. In Fuchs’ great work we are fortunate in possessing, in addition to the botanical drawings, a full-length portrait of the author himself, holding a spray of Veronica, on the verso of the title-page (see Frontispiece), and, at the end of the work, named portraits, which are generally supposed to represent the artist who drew the plants from nature, the draughtsman whose business it was to copy the outline on to the wood, and the engraver who actually cut the block (Text-fig. 89). It has also been suggested that the first of these is perhaps engaged in colouring a printed sheet. These portraits are powerfully drawn, and remarkably convincing. It is pleasant to think that we know not merely the names, but the very features of the men who collaborated to give us what is perhaps the most beautiful herbal ever produced. The influence of Fuchs’ illustrations is more strongly felt in later work than that of his text. The majority of the wood engravings in Bock’s ‘Kreuter Bůch’ (1546), Dodoens’ ‘Crǔ deboeck’ (1554), Turner’s ‘New Herball’ (1551-1568), Lyte’s ‘Niewe Herball’ (1578) and Jean Bauhin’s ‘Historia plantarum universalis’ (1651), are copied from Fuchs, or even printed from his actual wood-blocks, while a number of his figures reappear in the herbals of Egenolph, d’Aléchamps, Tabernæmontanus, etc., and the commentaries of Ruellius and Amatus Lusitanus on Dioscorides. [Illustration: Text-fig. 32. “Cucumis turcicus” = _Cucurbita maxima_ Duch., Giant Pumpkin [Fuchs, De historia stirpium, 1542]. _Reduced._] Fuchs arranged his work alphabetically, making no attempt at a natural grouping of the plants, and his herbal is therefore without importance in the history of plant classification. His influence on methods of plant description was, however, considerable, as is shown by the fact that Dodoens, in his ‘Crǔ deboeck,’ took Fuchs’ herbal as a model for the order of description of each plant. Fuchs’ text, as well as his figures, may thus be said to have had an effect, even if an indirect one, on British botany, since the herbals of Lyte and of Gerard are based on the work of Dodoens, in which, as we have just shown, the influence of Fuchs is clearly felt.