The history of science contains much that is curiously beautiful, and nowhere more so than in the botanical sciences. A glance through the major botanical works of the past few centuries reveals the history of a discipline where technical knowledge and artistic expressiveness have frequently served a common purpose.
     The Smith College community is fortunate to possess an archive where such histories are not only preserved, but also made freely available to the scholarly and the curious. The Mortimer Rare Book Room in Smith's Neilson Library is a treasure trove of botanical science and lore. The collections, which include the great herbals of the Renaissance as well as nineteenth-century floral illustrations and contemporary botanically inspired art books, represent European botanical science and illustration from the time of the earliest printed material through recent history.
     The oldest of the Rare Book Room's botanical holdings, dating back a venerable five centuries, is a small printed book with woodcut illustrations. Herbarius latinus, an herbal compiled from various sources by Peter Schoeffer, was published in 1484. As Elizabeth Kates, Bibliographical Specialist of the Rare Book Room, points out, this was only a few decades after Gutenberg had invented the printing press. The first printed books resembled the painstakingly hand-lettered manuscripts that preceded them, and often drew on their predecessors' highly stylized illustrations. "When type was invented, it was based on manuscript hands," says Kates, and from the appearance of the Schoeffer, this seems to be true. The closely set letters appear inscrutably medieval, and bear a greater resemblance to the careful hand of a scholarly monk than to latter-day typefaces.

Rose from Schoeffer's 1484 Herbarius latinus

The book in the Rare Book Room's collection was owned by a physician, who made careful notes in the margins on the diseases treatable by each plant. Beside each of Schoeffer's Latin plant names, another owner wrote more familiar common names: "Radysh," in tiny, precise handwriting, makes clear the meaning of the Latin Radix. Interestingly, many of Schoeffer's Latin names are still in use five hundred years later.      The woodcuts illustrating Schoeffer's Herbarius were copied from illustrations in manuscripts, which themselves had been copied from other

Periwinkle from Brunfels' 1534
Herbarum vivae eicones ad naturae imitationem

manuscripts, so that each woodcut was many generations removed from the original image. As a result, the Schoeffer woodcuts are highly stylized and contain few identifying details. Although they are simple and easy to reproduce (an advantage in a world in which books were frequently copied), they would be nearly useless as guides to field identification. Soon to follow, however, was a generation of herbalists who would draw their vivid and lifelike images from plants in the field. In the sixty years following the publication of Schoeffer's Herbarius, botanical illustration changed dramatically with the publication of three German classics: voluminous herbals by Leonhart Fuchs, Otto Brunfels, and Hieronymus Bock (not to be confused with the phantasmagoric painter Hieronymous Bosch, of the same period). The horticulturally minded may recognize from these names the plant genera Fuchsia and Brunfelsia, named in honor of the German herbalists.
     The life drawings of the German herbals ushered in a new, Renaissance period of botanical illustration, at a time in which all of Europe seemed infused with a new vitality. The spirit of the age is exemplified in Fuchs' New Kreüterbuch, in which an entire page is illustrated with portraits of the illustrator, the copyist, and the block-cutter at work producing a woodcut. The quality of Albrecht Meyer's illustrations for the Kreüterbuch was good enough that they could be used to
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