territory of considerable extent was thus examined; it was enlarged by the contributions which travellers brought or transmitted to the botanists, and de l’Écluse especially traversed a large part of Germany and Hungary and even of Spain, and eagerly collected and described the plants of those countries. During this period also the number of known plants was increased from Italy, partly by the exertions of Italian botanists, such as Mattioli, and partly by travelling Germans. The first flora of the Thüringer-Wald was written by Thal, but not published till after his death in 1588. Botanical gardens even, though in more modest form than in our day, were already helping in the 16th century to add to the knowledge of plants; the first were formed in Italy, as at Padua in 1545, at Pisa in 1547, at Bologna in 1567 under Aldrovandi, afterwards under Cesalpino. Soon similar collections of living plants were made in the north; in 1577 a botanic garden was founded at Leyden, over which de l’Éluse long presided, in 1593 at Heidelberg and at Montpellier; in the course of the next century the number of these gardens was considerably increased. The preserving of dried plants, the formation of the collections which we now call herbaria, dates from the 16th century; at that time however the word herbarium meant a book of plants. In this matter also the Italians led the way. According to Ernst Meyer, Luca Ghini seems to have been the first who made use of dried plants for scientific purposes, and his two pupils Aldrovandi and Cesalpino are said to have formed the first herbaria in our sense of the word; one of the first collections of the kind, perhaps of the date of 1559, was the herbarium formed by Ratzenberger, which was discovered in the museum at Cassel a few years since and described by Kessler.