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Proof to A. Arber
52 Huntingdon Road AN16A
Cambridge

Thomas Johnson: Botanist and Royalist. By H. Wallis Kew and H.E.Powell.
Longmans, Green and Co. 1932. 8/6 net.

The most famous of the English herbals, that of John Gerard,
appeared in 1597 and held the field without a competitor for more than a
generation. Though the book was full of errors, no further edition appeared
during this time; if was not until rumours arose that John Parkinson would
soon produce a new herbal to take its place, that the successors of Gerard's
original publisher were brought to the point of undertaking a second edition.
In 1632 they commissioned Thomas Johnson, a well-known London apothecary and
botanist, to carry out the work, with the proviso that it must be completed
in a year. This was a heavy task. It not only included the correction of
Gerard's frequent mistakes, and the incorporation of an entirely different
set of over 2500 wood blocks from Antwerp (which had formerly illustrated the
works of Dodoens, de l'Écluse and de l'Obel) but also the writing of a comprehensive historical introduction. Johnson achieved all this with remarkable
success. His editorial methods show a scholarly feeling which strikes one as
surprisingly modern; he evolved an elaborate system of marking the text to
distinguish the degrees to which he had altered or rewritten Gerard's
descriptions, while those accounts of plants which he had received from his
friend Goodyer, were printed in a form which made them readily recognisable.

His edition of Gerard, alone, was sufficient to establish
Johnson's reputation, but his independent botanical work was, in reality,
even more significant. His accounts of his plant-collecting excursions are
the earliest attempts to record all the plants of England and Wales with their
localities, and, but for his early death in the Civil War, there is little
doubt that he would have carried out his intention of writing (in conjunction
with Goodyer) a descriptive and illustrated British flora, of a type which did
not actually come into being until the eighteenth century.

The fact that Johnson has hitherto lacked an adequate biography, is
partly accounted for by the extreme difficulty of tracking down the history