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832 THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT SATURDAY DECEMBER 31 1938
Antiquarian Notes
PRIVATE LIBRARIES
XIII—A BOTANICAL COLLECTION
From a Special Correspondent
Mr. Francis Druce has been a book-collector for many years. His original interest was in meteorological books, but in 1913 he began also to collect botanical works, at first principally the current publications needful for a study of British wild flowers, and he continued to form this double collection until his death. He was wont upon moving from a house to a flat, he presented his meteorological library to the Royal Meteorological Society. His other collections he has continued to add to and to improve, so that they are confidently anticipated by his friends, especially those who have ever visited a bookshop in his company, that he will soon have to move back again into a house.
The fine botanical library which Mr. Druce has brought together is almost entirely British in its contents, though it has stepped abroad at times, as in a large section of foreign floras, chiefly European. Yet on the whole it is a British collection, and its interest lies not so much in the wide variety of the books as in the beauty and rarity of the most important among them. The library contains not only some of the finest early herbals, among the classics of English botanical literature; but also many shelves of popular and "chatty" books which, though often trivial in themselves, are, in the mass, of the greatest interest in illustrating the social background of the subject.
FIFTEENTH CENTURY HERBALS
Among the herbals in this collection are a few incunabula, notably the "Livre de Propriétés des Herbes," in two volumes. Among others, Bartholomew de Glanville, a fourteenth-century English monk. This, as Mrs. Agnes Arber explains in her admirable book on herbals, is one of the earliest printed works containing botanical information, and twenty-five editions of it appeared before the end of the 15th century. Mr. Druce's copy is of that printed at Cologne in 1483, and copied from the Bodleian Herbarium Library. Other incunabula are an undated Maer Floridus "De Viribus Herbarum," a tenth-century poem in Latin hexameters, of which Mr. Druce has two editions, one of 1510, printed either at Paris or Caen, with running commentary; and one of the important German botanical books of the century, the "Ortus Sanitatis," in the edition made by Johann of St. Gall in 1497. Of this Mr. Druce also has the first Italian edition, issued at Venice in 1511. In addition he has the "Herbolario Volgare," Venice, 1536, an Italian edition of the Latin "Herbarius" originally printed at Mainz in 1484.
Undoubtedly, however, the most remarkable of his herbals is the first edition of "The Grete Herbal," which "giveth particular knowledge and understanding of the names of herbs and there gracious vertues which God hath ordened," printed at Southwark by Peter Treveris in 1526. The copy of this rare and valuable book is exceptionally fine, one thing certainly better than those in the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Cambridge University Library and the library of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is, indeed, a work in large part, a translation of "Le Grant Herbier en Françoys," of which Mr. Druce has an apparently otherwise unrecorded edition, undated but printed by Jehan Janot, who died in 1522.
With "The Grete Herbal," the collection of English botanical books begins, but it may be convenient to mention here that the library contains also many famous continental works of the sixteenth century, including writings by Bock and Dodonaeus, especially Bock's "De Historia Stirpium Commentarii," 1546, magnificently illustrated, a folio which is of particular interest in that it contains portraits, not only of the author himself, but also of the two other two draughtsmen and an engraver, who worked for him. There must be added to the list the first edition of Pena and de la Cruz's "Stirpium Adversaria Nova," 1570, which, though written by foreign-born botanists, was published in London. The reverse is true of the book by which William Turner, "the father of British botany," is represented in Mr. Druce's collection. The full complete edition of the three parts of Turner's "Herbal" appeared at Cologne in 1568, a fine copy which contains not only "A Book of the Natures and properties as well of the Bathe[s] in England, as also of the bathes in Germanye and Italye" which properly forms a part Most excellent and perfecte homish apothecarye," 1561.
Of the English herbalist whose name is most widely known, John Gerard, Mr. Druce has the only three early editions, the first of 1597 and those edited by Thomas Johnson in 1613 and 1636, and he also has a much rarer work by Gerard, the Catalogus Arborum Fruticum ac Plantarum garden. This is the second edition, the first being too rare even to hope for. The next great figure among the earlier British botanists, John Parkinson, is represented by the "Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris" (or in other words, "Parkinson's Park on Earth") of 1629, with the second edition of 1640, and the "Theatrum Botanicum" of 1640. Of the great classics of English botanical literature it will perhaps be sufficient to mention the three editions of James Sowerby's "English Botany," and the magnificent uncut set, in original boards, of William Curtis's great folio, the "Flora Londinensis" of 1772-1794.
ENGLISH LOCAL FLORAS
But, as already said, it is not by any means entirely the rarities and fine books which give Mr. Druce's collection its character. This is due almost as much to such things as the series of more than 300 local floral floras-books, that is, describing the flowers of a particular county or smaller area. The first of such books in England, Thomas Johnson's Latin account of his botanical explorations in Kent, of which editions appeared in 1629 and 1632—has so far eluded the collector, but he has the next publication of this kind, John Ray's "Catalogus Plantarum Circa Cantabrigiam Nascentium," a small 8vo, printed by J. Field of Cambridge in 1660. The interest of this work, which prompts one to wonder why, if the plants of Cambridge had this book written about them in 1660, and others by John Martyn in 1727
