Turner's notable work, his Herbal, is the only original work on botany written by any Englishman in the sixteenth century. The first part of it was printed in London by Steven Mierdman, a Protestant refugee from Antwerp, in 1551. The second part was printed by Arnold Birckman, at Cologne, in 1561, during Turner's enforced exile. Birckman also printed the edition of 1568, which contained all three parts. (For the full title, etc., see Bibliography of Herbals, p. 208.) One of the most attractive features of this Herbal is the number of beautiful woodcuts with which it is illustrated. A few were specially drawn and cut for the author, but the great majority are reproductions of the exquisite drawings in Fuchs's herbals (_De historia Stirpium_, 1545; and _Neue Kreüterbuch_, 1543). Nearly all the illustrations in the famous sixteenth-century Flemish, English and Swiss herbals were printed from the actual wood-blocks or copied from the illustrations in Fuchs's works. Notably in Hieronymus Bock's _Kreüter Buch_ (1546), Rembert Dodoens's _Cruÿdtboeck_ (1554), Henry Lyte's _Niewe Herball_ (1578), and Jean Bauhin's _Historia plantarum universalis_ (1651). It is a remarkable fact that so far as wood-engraving is concerned this country has contributed nothing to the art of plant illustration. In the first English illustrated Herbal, the _Grete Herball_ of 1526, the figures are merely copies of the inferior cuts in the later editions of the _Herbarius zu Teutsch_, and, with the exception of Parkinson's _Paradisus_, all the English sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century herbals borrowed their illustrations from Flemish or German sources. Fuchs had two sets of blocks for his Herbal, one for the folio edition of 1542 and the other for the octavo edition of 1545. It was the blocks for the latter which were borrowed by Turner's printer, and it has been suggested that it was his desire to secure these beautiful illustrations which led him to have his herbal printed at Cologne.[66] Over 400 of Fuchs's blocks were used in the complete edition of Turner's Herbal, and, of the rest, some are copied from the smaller figures in Mattioli's[67] commentary on Dioscorides. Turner dedicated the first part of his Herbal (1551) to the Duke of Somerset, uncle to Edward VI., and at that time Lord Protector. The preface is delightful and I quote a part of it:--