Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

Page transcription

6

We must pass rapidly over Aemilius Macer whose poem was first printed in
1477 and first illustrated just after 1490 as shown here ( ) with its
titlepage and with these more or less stylized figures ( ) a few,
however, being much better ( ) Many of them turned up in late editions
of the Hortus Sanitatis ( )

We come now to the great trio of works each of which, in its earliest
edition, was produced in the great printing center of Mainz. The first of
these, the Herbarius Moguntinus, is almost as famous in the history of botanical
publication as the Gutenberg Bible in that of theological publication. The
Missouri Botanical Garden owns one of the few remaining copies of the 'editio
princeps', the genuine first edition. Here ( ) it is in its limp leather,
very probably original, cover, all of it as it was published except its title
page, which was very simple indeed, reading, ( ) as shown in this typed
copy, only: "Herbarius. Ma-|gentie impressus|Anno 7clxxxiiij". Still, it's
too bad not to have it, for this book was one of the earliest to have any title
page at all. Its first leaf looks like this. ( ) Written in Latin it
says that the book is for those poor and needy who cannot afford the expensive
drugs of the apothecaries, but who can learn from it to use native simples.
There are 150 plants discussed, all but five of them native to Germany or at
least at that time cultivated in German gardens. Each one is figured ( )
and given a Latin name and a vernacular name, following which there is a
recital of its properties and virtues. Here we have the lily, cold and moist
in the first degree, it says, and, we might say, looking rather like these
modern Japanese plastic plants in which there is no integral relation between
the leaves and the stem. The iris ( ) hot and dry in the second degree, has
diuretic virtues, and may be used against opilation of the spleen and liver
(provided you can find out what opilation is). By the way, the text here illus-
trates very well the abbreviations used in early printing. These were taken over
directly from the manuscript writers and were freely used to save space and to