The encyclopædic books of this period--the curious compendiums of the knowledge of those days--were full of entertaining woodcuts, diagrams, and devices, and the various treatises on grammar, arithmetic, geometry, physiology, anatomy, astronomy, geography, were made attractive by them, each section preceded perhaps by an allegorical figure of the art or science discoursed of in the costume of a grand dame of the period. The herbals and treatises on animals were often filled with fine floral designs and vigorous, if sometimes half-mythical, representations of animals. [Sidenote: FUCHSIUS.] [Sidenote: HERBALS.] There are fine examples of plant drawing in a beautiful herbal ("Fuchsius: De Historia Stirpium"; Basle, Isingrin, 1542). They are not only faithful and characteristic as drawings of the plants themselves, but are beautiful as decorative designs, being drawn in a fine free style, and with a delicate sense of line, and well thrown upon the page. At the beginning of the book is a woodcut portrait of the author, Leonard Fuchs--possibly the fuchsia may have been named after him--and at the end is another woodcut giving the portrait of the artist, the designer of the flowers, and the draughtsman on wood and the formschneider, or engraver on wood, beneath, who appears to be fully conscious of his own importance. The first two are busy at work, and it will be noticed the artist is drawing from the flower itself with the point of a brush, the brush being fixed in a quill in the manner of our water-colour brushes. The draughtsman holds the design or paper while he copies it upon the block. The portraits are vigorously drawn in a style suggestive of Hans Burgmair. Good examples of plant drawing which is united with design are also to be found in Matthiolus (Venice, 1583), and in a Kreuterbuch (Strasburg, 1551), and in Gerard's Herbal, of which there are several editions. As examples of design in animals, there are some vigorous woodcuts in a "History of Quadrupeds," by Conrad Gesner, printed by Froschover, of Zurich, in 1554. The porcupine is as like a porcupine as need be, and there can be no mistake about his quills. The drawings of birds are excellent, and one of a crane (as I ought, perhaps, more particularly to know) is very characteristic. [Illustration: ITALIAN SCHOOL. XVITH CENTURY. (TOSCULANO, ALEX. PAGANINI, 1520.) (_Comp. Dürer's title page, Nuremberg, 1523._)] [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. XVITH CENTURY. "FUCHSIUS: DE HISTORIA STIRPIUM." (BASLE, ISINGRIN, 1542.)] [Sidenote: THE NEW SPIRIT.]