One of Plantin’s daughters married Jean Moretus, her father’s chief assistant and successor, and from him the business descended through eight generations of printers to Édouard Jean Hyacinthe Moretus, the last of his race, from whom, in 1876, the citizens of Antwerp purchased the Maison Plantin and its contents. The house had remained practically unchanged since the days when Christophe Plantin lived and worked there, and it is now preserved as the Musée Plantin-Moretus. It is built round a rectangular courtyard, and its beauty, both in proportion and in detail, is such, that one feels at once that Plantin achieved the ambition he expressed in his charming sonnet—‘_Le Bonheur de ce Monde_’—“Avoir une maison commode, propre et belle.” [Illustration: Text-fig. 36. Rembert Dodoens, 1517-1585 [A Niewe Herball, translated by Lyte, 1578].] The pictures, furniture and hangings, and not only the very presses, fonts, and furnaces for casting the type, but even the old account books and corrected proof-sheets are still to be seen, all in their appropriate places. The wage-books are preserved, showing the weekly earnings of compositors, engravers and book-binders, throughout a period of three centuries. In short, the Maison Plantin beggars description, and a visit there is an infallible recipe for transporting the imagination back to the time of the Renaissance, when printing was in its first youth, and was treated with the reverence due to one of the fine arts. The first Belgian botanist of world-wide renown was Rembert Dodoens [or Dodonæus] (Text-fig. 36). He was a contemporary of Plantin, having been born at Malines in 1517[11]. He studied at Louvain, and visited the universities and medical schools of France, Italy and Germany, eventually qualifying as a doctor. He was successful in his profession, being physician to the Emperors Maximilian II and Rudolph II, and finally becoming Professor of Medicine at Leyden, where he died in 1585. His interest in the medical aspect of botany led him to write a herbal, and, in order to illustrate it, he obtained the use of the wood-blocks which had been employed in the octavo edition of Fuchs’ work. To these a number of new engravings were added. The book was published in Dutch in the year 1554 by Vanderloe, under the title ‘Crǔ deboeck.’ The text is not a translation of Fuchs, as is sometimes supposed, although Dodoens took Fuchs as his model for the order of description of each plant. The method of arrangement is his own, and he indicates localities and times of flowering in the Low Countries, information which clearly could not have been derived from the earlier writer. Almost simultaneously with the first Dutch edition, a French issue appeared under the title of ‘Histoire des Plantes.’ The translation was carried out by Charles de l’Écluse, with whose own work we shall shortly deal. Dodoens supervised the production of the book, and took the opportunity to make some additions. It became known in