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7
make lines come out evenly. And here is teasel ( ); it could be any one of several species. How inferior to the figure of teasel in Dioskorides which we saw a few moments ago! Note the stylized quality of the woodcuts, almost as stylized as decorators' devices, with their symmetry and only bare suggestion of diagnostic characters. We are reminded of the figures in Apuleius Barbarus, although these before us are much more pleasing to look at. We do not know the source of these drawings but they accord well with the sort of thing found in many ms herbals. This book has no author and was very probably copied directly from a ms at that time a hundred or more years old and now no longer in existence. But despite its quotations from the older authors of the 10th to 13th centuries, and even from Dioskorides here and there, it is fairly clearly a product of German compilation.

This book was produced by Peter Schoeffer, not quite the founder of printing, but by many considered the first really successful printer and credited with having clinched, by his genius, the manifold details which had to be made to work together for successful printing. The book is important in botanical history because it was the first essentially local product printed for very practical use, fully, though badly, illustrated and it was the book upon which all succeeding herbals for over fifty years were modelled. It appeared in many Latin editions, and in translation, especially in Italian. Immediately the next year, 1485, Schoeffer brought out a totally new herbal in German, the so-called Gart der Gesundheit, or Garden of health. The Missouri Botanical Garden has no copy of the first edition of this work, but it does have an early copy of a pirated edition which appeared in nearby Augsburg in 1487, from the press of a printer named Schoensperger. Schoeffer's work was entirely new. It was probably written by a man named Johann von Cube, a town physician of Frankfurt, who is known to have travelled in the eastern Mediterranean with a good artist at just about that time, exactly as the preface claims the author did. He wrote in German in order that both the learned and unlearned might profit from the