Dr. Priest translated all the botanical works of
Dodonaeus, with much greater fulness than Lyte had done, and this
volume was the germ of Gerard's far more famous production. John
Gerard was a Cheshire man, born in 1545, who came up to London, and
practised there as a surgeon.

According to his editor and continuator, Thomas Johnson, who speaks of
Gerard with startling freedom, this excellent man was by no means well
equipped for the task of compiling a great Herbal. He knew so little
Latin, according to this too candid friend, that he imagined Leonard
Fuchsius, who was a German contemporary of his own, to be one of the
ancients. But Johnson is a little too zealous in magnifying his own
office. He brings a worse accusation against Gerard, if I understand
him rightly to charge him with using Dr. Priest's manuscript
collections after his death, without giving that physician the credit
of his labours. When Johnson made this accusation, Gerard had been
dead twenty-six years. In any case it seems certain that Gerard's
original _Herbal_, which, beyond question, surpassed all its
predecessors when it was printed in folio in 1597, was built up upon
the ground-work of Priest's translation of Dodonaeus. Nearly forty
years later, Thomas Johnson, himself a celebrated botanist, took up
the book, and spared no pains to reissue it in perfect form. The
result is the great volume before us, an elephant among books, the
noblest of all the English Herbals. Johnson was seventy-two years of
age when he got this gigantic work off his hands, and he lived eleven
years longer to enjoy his legitimate success.

The great charm of this book at the present time consists in the
copious woodcuts. Of these there are more than two thousand, each a
careful and original study from the plant itself. In the course of two
centuries and a half, with all the advance in appliances, we have not
improved a whit on the original artist of Gerard's and Johnson's time.
The drawings are all in strong outline, with very little attempt at
shading, but the characteristics of each plant are given with a truth
and a simplicity which are almost Japanese. In no case is this more
extraordinary than in that of the orchids, or "satyrions," as they
were called in the days of the old herbalist. Here, in a succession of
little figures, each not more than six inches high, the peculiarity of
every portion of a full-grown flowering specimen of each species is
given with absolute p