"They say that if any doe sleepe under the shadow thereof it causeth sickness and sometimes death and that if birds do eat of the fruit thereof it causeth them to cast their feathers and many times to die. All which I dare boldly affirme is altogether untrue: for when I was young and went to schoole divers of my schoole-fellowes and likewise myselfe did eat our fils of the berries of this tree and have not only slept under the shadow thereof but among the branches also, without any hurt at all, and that not one time but many times." It is supposed that at an early age he studied medicine. In his Herbal he speaks of having travelled to Moscow, Denmark, Sweden and Poland, and it is possible that he went abroad as a ship's surgeon. This, however, is mere surmise. We know that in 1562 he was apprenticed to Alexander Mason, who evidently had a large practice, for he was twice warden of the Barber-Surgeons' Company. Gerard was admitted to the freedom of the same company in 1569.[78] Before 1577 he must have settled in London, for in his Herbal he tells us that for twenty years he had superintended the gardens belonging to Lord Burleigh in the Strand and at Theobalds in Hertfordshire. Hentzner, in his _Itinerarium_, gives a lengthy account of the gardens at Theobalds when Gerard was superintendent. Gerard's own house was in Holborn and, as already mentioned, his garden, where he had over a thousand different herbs, was in what is now Fetter Lane.[79] What a wonderful garden that must have been, and how full it was of "rarities," ranging from white thyme to the double-flowered peach. How often we read of various plants, "these be strangers in England yet I have them in my garden," sometimes with the triumphant addition, "where they flourish as in their natural place of growing." In 1596 Gerard published a catalogue of twenty-four pages of the plants in this garden--the first complete catalogue of the plants in any garden, public or private.[80] A second edition was published in 1599. Of Gerard's knowledge of plants the members of his own profession had a high opinion. George Baker, one of the "chief chirurgions in ordinarie" to Queen Elizabeth, wrote of him: "I protest upon my conscience that I do not thinke for the Knowledge of plants that he is inferior to any, for I did once see him tried with one of the best strangers that ever came into England and was accounted in Paris the onely man,[81] being recommended to me by that famous man M. Amb. Parens; and he being here was desirous to go abroad with some of our herbarists, for the whiche I was the means to bring them together, and one whole day we spent therein, searching the most rarest simples: but when it came to the triall my French man did not know one to his fower." In 1598, the year after the publication of his Herbal, and again in 1607, Gerard was appointed examiner of candidates for admission to the freedom of the Barber-Surgeons' Company, but apart