Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

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Dont recevras un profit incroyable
Etant c'est oeuvre a tes yeux agresable.

This copy of verses is succeeded by wood-cuts and text relating to
seventy-one herbs, interpersed among which are a few descriptions with no
pictures appended. This part of the book occupies 150 pages, and is followed
by a short section (five pages) treating of Tobacco. This concludes the portion
of the little volume which can strictly be called an herbal, but there
still remain about an hundred pages of miscellaneous medical recipes, beginning
with plague remedies.

Such botanical interest as the herbal possesses, lies chiefly in the
descriptions of the plants enumerated; these diagnoses, however, are often
curiously sketchy. Cow Parsley (Persil), for instance, receives no description
beyond the statement that in the month of May the places where it grows
are almost entirely white with its flowers; this, though true and picturesque,
is scarcely adequate for purposes of identification! But occasionally something more in the modern manner is achieved. In treating of Cyclamen, the
translator adds the information that it is to be found in abundance in the
forest of Orleans; the description, derived from Fuchs, states that It has
Ivy leaves of purplish colour, and mottled above and below by white blotches,
the stem four fingers long, naked and leafless, in which flowers are formed
like Roses of purplish colour: the root is black, like to the Turnip.

In the sixteenth century the way in which the phenomena of sex
extend to the plant world was not understood, and the words "male" and "female"
were used in senses that now sound strange to our ears. In Fuchs's herbal we
meet with the old belief that the scarlet and blue varieties of the Pimpernel
are respectively masculine and feminine - a belief which also finds expression
in the English herbals of Henry Lyte and William Turner. The record runs
as follows:- Il y a masle et femelle: qui ne different en aucune chose fors
en couleur de fleur le masle porte fleur de couleur incarnate, et la femelle
de couleur d'azur.

A great part of the herbal is taken up with an account of the