Herbal In Italy ( Originally Published 1912 ) The Italian
botanists of the Renaissance devoted them-selves chiefly to
interpreting the works of the classical writers on Natural
History, and to the identification of the plants to which they
referred. This came about quite naturally, from the fact that
the Mediterranean flora, which they saw around them, was
actually that with which the writers in question had been, in
their day, familiar. The botanists of southern Europe were not
compelled, as were those whose homes lay north of the Alps, to
distort facts before they could make the plants of their native
country fit into the procrustean bed of classical descriptions.
One of the chief of the commentators and herbalists of this
period was Pierandrea Mattioli [or Matthiolus] (Text-fig. 40),
who was born at Siena in 1501, and died of the plague in 1577.
We realise something of the frightful extent of this scourge,
when we remember that it claimed as victims no less than three
of the small company of Renaissance bo