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Page 131 · DO #1810 · 142_Payne_Schreiber_Vol.1_r
- Collection
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Payne, Joseph Frank (1840–1910 and Schreiber) manuscript of speech "On the 'Herbarius' and 'Hortus Sanitatis'" (Payne) and "The Herbals of the XVth and XVIth Centuries"
- Item/Folder
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Manuscript, 1901, 21 January 1901
- Digital Object
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DO #1810,
page 131
- Collection-level dates
- 21 January 1901
Page transcription
I'll give more details about this edition in a later paragraph, where some other Frankfurt herbals are to be mentioned; for the moment I have to say a word about Conrad Gesner, who used to be called the German Plinius. The home of this excellent physician and scientist was Zürich, and originally he owes his reputation to his "History of the Animal World" (Geschichte des Tierreiches), of which the first instalments appeared in 1550 at Froschauer's in Zürich, whilst the last part was only published 30 years after his death. His herbal was quite unfinished, when he died at Zürich in 1565, but he left behind a lot of preliminary work on it. The significance and merits of this remarkable scientist were first appreciated by J. Simler in a pamphlet, printed at Zürich in 1566, entitled: "Vita philosophi et medici Conradi Gesneri"; later part of the plant-pictures, left behind by him, were made known to the world, as I have just said, by Gomeraius, but a complete edition of them only appeared in Nuremberg in 1754 at K.K.Schmiddel's. Gesner was the first person to classify the plants according to the peculiarities of their flowers and seeds into species and families, creating thus the first foundation for modern botany. He gave expression to this idea in his illustrations by adding enlarged pictures of flowers and seeds to each plant, a procedure which was imitated in most of the later herbals.
Publishers' activities at Frankfurt.
We now have to turn back a little to study the situation at Frankfurt. We already know, that Egenolff by no means had a monopoly there; all the same, we shall first consider exclusively his publications. Incidentally, F.W.E. Roth published in the XIXth volume of the "Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen" a bibliographical study about the various editions of Egenolff's herbals.
