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OLD HERBARIA. 277
was an * Index Plantarum omnium quas in sexdecim voluminibus
diversis temporibus c.c siccatus (t;iijliitin/irit.' Cesalpiui distinctly
alludes to two dried collections of plants which must have been
formed by him before 1574. The oldest existing collection of
which I am aware is that of Jean Girault, of Lyons, 1558.
Rauwolf brought home from the East over 500 dried plants collected
in the years 1573 to 1576. Kauwolf says of two plants found
near Tripoli that he had glued them with various other foreign
plants. They were preserved in the library at Leyden. Aldrovandi's
collection existed in the early part of the seventeenth
century. Whether it is still preserved I am at present unable to
say. It was made, as was that of Cesalpini, between 1553 and
1563. Adrian Spiegel was probably the first author who described
the method of drying plants, which he did in his ' Isagoges in rem
herbariam,' 1606. He gives the name JwHos hyemales to the
volumes of dried plants.
" It has recently been my good fortune to meet with, at Oxford,
among some bundles of specimens, a very old collection of dried
plants. They had probably been at Oxford for some years, for the
bundle was labelled on the outside by the old curator, Mr. Baxter,
' A collection of very old plants, chiefly British, with MS. descrip-
tions and synonyms. Looked over and cleaned, September, 1862.'
Under this Professor Daubeny had written, ' In the handwriting of
Dillenius, with long description of each plant attached.'
" When the parcel was handed to me by the curator, I saw at
once that it was not Dillenius's handwriting, with which I was very
familiar. On taking it home I quickly saw that the plants were
not British. After a little study I came upon a label which gave
me a clue to their home, and subsequent research proved them to
have been collected by a Capuchin, Gregory of Reggio, in the
province of Bologna (not the more celebrated Reggio in Calabria),
in 1G06. Many of these specimens are admirably preserved. They
were fastened on the paper by means of little strips of paper, not
glued, but with some resinous cement, of which olibanum was the
principal ingredient. To each plant was attached a paper label,
just as the majority of botanists fix them now, /. c, by cutting a
line through the top, and through this loop pushing the plant.
" The labels in themselves are most interesting, as Gregory
gives the synonyms used for the plants by the early writers,
Mattioli, Lobelius, Cesalpini, Fuchs, Camerarius, Tragus, kc.
Also the habitats of the plant in a few cases precisely localised, its
therapeutic uses, and the date of flowering. Occasionally he gives
reasons for differing from preceding authors, or again gives a name
to what he considers to be a new species. Altogether, I suppose
this collection to be unique. It was bound in the leaves of an
Italian service book, and labelled at the back, ' Ilerbarum Divers-
[arnm] Nat [uraliuui] Gregorii a Reggio.' This name probably
has precedence over any other as the title of a collection of plants.
" A writer in the ' Gardeners' Chronicle ' says that he knew of
the existence of the Ilortus Siccus of Gregory of Reggio, but he
refers him to the Calabrian not the Bononian Reggio. it is to the