A reprint of a classical work in the Cambridge Library Collection.
Richard Pulteney (1730-1801) was a Leicestershire physician whose medical career suffered both from a lack of aristocratic patronage and from his dissenting religious background. However, his lifelong interest in botany and natural history, and particularly his work on the new Linnaean system of botanical classification, led to publications in the "Gentleman's Magazine" and the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society". He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1762. His book on Linnaeus (also reissued in this series), first published in 1782, was later considered to be of great significance for the acceptance in England of the Linnaean system, and this two-volume work, published in 1790, is still relevant to the study of the history of botany.
Volume 1 begins in 'primaeval' and 'druidical' times and continues to the seventeenth century, including the first printed herbals and the work of the great botanist John Ray.
1. Primaeval botany, druidical and Saxon botany
2. Botany of the middle ages
3. History of, continued to the revival of learning
4. First printed books on botany, Hernarius. Hortus Sanitatis, Grete Herbal, first English printed book on the subject. Ascham: Copland: first botanic gardens
5. Turner, and his contemporaries
6. Bulleyn, Penny, Maplet, and Morning
7. Lyte
8. Lobel, and Newton
9. Dodoens and Gerard
10. Johnson, Goodyer, Bowles, and others
11. Parkinson, Boel, Gordier, and others
12. History of wooden cuts of plants
13. The Oxford physic garden founded
14. Tradescant, astrological herbalists, Turner, Culpepper, and Lovel, Pechey, and Salmon
15. Ray: his Catalogue Cantabrigiensis
16. Ray, continued: Catalogus Plantarum Angliae, et Stirpium Exoticarum
17. Ray, continued: Catalogus Plantarum Angliae, second edition
18. Ray, continued: Historia Plantarum
19. Ray, continued: Synopsis Stirpium, et Sylloge Stirpium
20. Ray, continued: Methodus Plantarum emendata, his death and character
21. Cowley
22. Merret
23. Morison, bobart
24. History of the rise and progress of system in botany
25. Discovery of the sexes of plants
26. Willisel, Thomas, plot, natural histories of counties, Sir George Wheler