1771. 'The Flora Londinensis, by William Curtis. The first number was brought out by subscription on the above date. I have the two volumes of the first edition. It is the handsomest, the most artistic, and the best drawn of any English illustrated botanical books I have seen. I do not know who was the artist, but I imagine not Curtis himself. These plates have some of the qualities of Jacquin's drawings, of which more hereafter. How much they were in communication, a not uncommon custom of the time, I do not know. Curtis's first book was a translation of Linnaeus's, with the title of 'An Introduction to the Knowledge of Insects.'

In 1773 Curtis was appointed lecturer of the Chelsea Garden. The plates of 'The Flora Londinensis' are lovely large folio, and most delicately drawn and tinted. The text is in English, and is descriptive of the wild flowers and plants growing round London. No doubt the book was suggested to Curtis by Vaillant's 'Catalogue of Plants in the Environs of Paris.' It retains strongly the Herbal character, and the medical details of diseases are weird and extraordinary. The decision and particularity of the assurance that every disease to which flesh is heir will be relieved by the use of certain plants are quite surprising. The place where the innocent little wild plants are picked is always named, and it is pathetic to think of the growth of the city, and how the places mentioned are now densely covered with buildings and streets. The second edition, in five or six volumes, finished by Dr. Hooker, is far the more valuable and complete. Curtis began his 'Botanical Magazine, or Flower Garden Displayed' in 1778. I have the first sixty-seven volumes of this lovely and best known of all the Old English gardening publications. It is purely horticultural. Every alternate page is an illustration, with the letterpress on the opposite side describing the nature of the plant, the country from which it comes, and its cultivation here. With the same truthful accuracy with which he tells the home of the wild plant, he names the nurseryman or amateur who has flowered the exotic. The best drawings by far are in the early numbers, and were executed by Sowerby. The two who succeeded him were Sydenham Edwards and Dr. Hooker. Spode, the man who perfected the process of mixing bone-dust into the paste used for china in the early part of this century, used these illustrations a good deal for his pretty china dinner and dessert services, with the names of the flowers or plants marked at the back of the dishes.

1791. 'The Loves of the Plants, in two parts: The Botanic Garden and the Economy of Vegetation. A Poem by Erasmus Darwin,' seems to me one of the real curiosities of literature. It is unique, so far as I know, in its sincere desire to clothe the latest science in the garb of the Muse. The frontispiece, by Fuseli, is a drawing most characteristic of that artist and full of all his affectations. Flora, attired by the elements, is a striking example of the fashion and bad taste of the day, and yet it is full of ingenuity and skill in drawing. This frontispiece is well worth, by itself, the price I gave for the whole volume. Another print in the book, by the same artist, is called 'The Fertilisation of Egypt, 'meaning, of course, the rising of the Nile. A huge unclothed man with a dog's head is praying to the star Sirius. A note explains this by saying 'the Abbé La Pluche observes that as Sirius, or the Dog-star, rose at the time of the commencement of the flood, its rising was watched by the Astronomers and notice given of the approach of the inundation by hanging the figure of Anubis, which was that of a man with a dog's head, in all the Egyptian temples.' Erasmus Darwin's mind was evidently fascinated, as was common with all the scientific men of the day, by the fertilisation of plants. In one of his notes he says, 'The vegetable passion of love is agreeably seen in the flower of the Parnassia (Grass of Parnassus), in which the males alternately approach and recede from the female' (a practice not wholly unknown to many beside the innocent Parnassia), 'and in the flower of Nigella.' We call it now Love-in-the-Mist, 'in which the tall females bend down to their dwarf husbands' (a picture sometimes seen in modern drawing-rooms). Darwin goes on to say, 'I was surprised this morning to observe, amongst Sir Brooke Boothby's valuable collection of plants at Ashbourne, the manifest adultery of several females of the plant Collinsonia, who had bent themselves into contact with the males of the same plant in their vicinity, neglectful of their own.' The plate and note of Gloriosa superba I have mentioned elsewhere. As an outcome of the extraordinary effect of Linnaeus's work on thinking minds at the end of the last century, the book is of great interest, though we should not call it poetry in the modern sense. Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of our great Darwin, who did for the middle of this century so much more than even Linnaeus did for the end of the last. 1778. 'Miscellanea Austriaca, by Nicolai Josephi Jacquin.' This is the earliest Jacquin book that I have.

It is in two small volumes of note-books, with all the illustrations at the end. The text is in Latin; but this is of no consequence, as Jacquin's books are all botanical, not horticultural, and their botany is obsolete. This remarkable man, Nicholas Joseph Jacquin, whose industry must have been untiring, was born at Leyden in 1727, and educated there at the University for the medical profession. This meant in those days the highest botanical education which could be obtained. He went to Vienna, at the suggestion of a friend, to practise medicine, but when there his great botanical knowledge brought him to the notice of Francis I. This emperor seems to have been a great patron of botany and gardening, the fashionable combination of the day. He sent Jacquin to the West Indies for six years to collect plants for the Schonbrunn Gardens, paying his expenses. Jacquin did not die till 1817, leaving an unfinished work, ' Eclogae Plantarum Rariorum,' the only one of Jacquin's books that has a German as well as a Latin text. The second volume was not published till 1844, by Edouardus Fenzl, long after Jacquin's death. The colour and painting are very inferior to Jacquin's work. Towards the end of the last century, in the midst of wars and revolutions, the crumbling of old methods of government and the change of social customs, an extraordinary band of able men all over Europe were quietly working in concert and with constant communication. Their object was to increase the knowledge of the science of botany by reproducing, with the greatest botanical exactness of detail, the plants imported from all parts of the world as they flowered in Europe for the first time in the various greenhouses and stoves. It is remarkable that the books of this period, even of different countries, very rarely illustrate the same plants. The botanical curiosity, the feeling of something new, rare, and not fully understood, which is such an incentive to the human mind, has gone for ever as far as this kind of simple botany is concerned. Of these highly gifted men, who worked on lines which can no more be repeated than the missals of the sixteenth century in Italy, Jacquin, no doubt, was the most artistically interesting. No one who has not seen his works can realise the beauty, the delicacy, the truth, the detail to which flower-painting can be brought. None of the other flower-painters that I know show anything like the same talent of throwing the flower on to the paper with endless variety, and of adapting the design to the size and growth of the particular plant. This result seems produced by his botanical exactness, and not, apparently, by any intention to make a beautiful picture. No two pages are ever filled in the same way. This does away entirely with the ordinary wearisome monotony of turning over drawings one after the other, with the flower right in the middle of the page. His books fetch a considerable price, and are difficult to procure. The one I sometimes see in English catalogues is in my possession, five volumes of 'Collectanea ad Botanicam Chemiam et Historiam naturalem, 1786. 'My copy was a surplus one at the British Museum, of which it bears the stamp and date of sale, 1831. The plates maintain their usual excellence and are nearly all coloured, with a brilliancy that has not suffered at all from time. Some are of wild flowers, mosses, Lycopodiums, insects, and serpents. All Jacquin's drawings stand out wonderfully on the paper, but there is no shading, except that the modelling is indicated by a stronger tone of the same colour; and the relief and value, without any tinting of the background, are most effective. In the case of the bushy little Alpines the plant is spread out like seaweed and the root drawn, which gives the whole growth and proportion of the plant.