This collection of botanical prints contains original plates from herbals, plant histories, and botanical books and magazines from the 15th through the 19th centuries. The prints provide primary source materials illustrating the technological developments of early modern botanical, pharmacological , and medical sciences as well as the history and development of botanical illustration from woodcuts, to copperplate engravings, to chromolithographs. A few engraved portraits of botanists are included. The prints were selected to represent technical innovation in scientific illustration and for their intrinsic beauty.

The collection begins with a leaf from the Hortus Sanitatus of 1491, illustrated with woodcuts copied from manuscripts; followed by leaves from Leonhart Fuchs’s New Kreüterbuch of 1543, one of the earliest botanical works to reflect the new spirit of empirical observation and the beginnings of modern science. As scientific inquiry gathered momentum, the woodcut was replaced in the mid-sixteenth century by the copperplate engraving, which dominated the “golden age” of botanical illustration until the end of the eighteenth century, when printing from the surface of stone, or lithography, was invented by Aloys Senefelder in 1798. The lithograph quickly supplanted the costly engraving as a much cheaper and faster method of reproducing pictures. Thomas Bewick’s revival of “white line” wood engraving at about the same time was used for illustrating the cheaper popular natural history books.