HISTORY OF ESSEX BOTANY. 179
With reference to subsequent accusations it is necessary to
mention that Parkinson says, on the title-page of the Theatrum,
that "the chiefe notes of Dr. Lobel, Dr. Bonham, and others"
are "inserted therein" ; and, on p. 1060 of the same work, that
certain matter "he prevented by death failing to perform it, I
have by purchasing his Workes with my money here supplied."
As we know Lobel to have visited Coys and have little clue to
Parkinson's being in the county, it is possible that all these
Essex records may belong to Lobel, as do others not published
until 1655 when Dr. How, whose Phycologia had appeared five
years previously, issued the fragment known as Lobel's
Illustrationes.
Though chronologically Lobel should have been mentioned
earlier, we may insert a short account of him here. Born at
Lille, in Flanders, in 1538, the son of Jean de Lobel, a lawyer,
and early acquiring a taste for botany, he matriculated in the
faculty of medicine at Montpellier 22 May, [565, choosing
Rondelet, Regius Professor of Medicine "pro parente." Here he
made the acquaintance of Pierre Pena, a Provencal who had
matriculated in the same faculty a few weeks before, but was
probably Lobel's senior. Rondelet dying the following year
bequeathed his botanical manuscripts to Lobel and the two
fellow-students came to England. Here in 1571 they published
Stirpium Adversaria . . . authoribus Petro Pena et Mathia de
Lobel Medicis,31 a work of great importance, containing, says
Pulteney,32 "the first sketch, rude as it is, of a natural method of
arrangement."
Pena seems soon afterwards to have abandoned botany,
becoming Secret Physician to Henri III., and dying worth more
than 600,000 livres ! In 1576 Lobel published, through Plantin,
the great Antwerp printer, Observationes, with 1486 illustrations,
Plantin buying 800 copies of the Adversaria from the London
printer Thomas Purfoot for 1200 florins and binding them at the
end of the Observationes with the new joint title Plantarum sen
Stirpium Historia Matthiae de Lobel Insulani and a new title-page.
For this work Philip II. in 1577 decreed to Lobel a recompense
of 50 livres and in 1581 the whole was published in Dutch, with
31 In his Guide to the Literature of Botany (1881), p. xxxi., Mr. B. D. Jackson wrote of
Pena as Lobel's "shadowy colleague." Since then M. Ludovic Legre, in his Pierre Pena et
Mathias de Lobel (Marseilles, 1899), has thrown a flood of light upon this "shadowy"
personality, showing that most of the continental travel previous to 1565 alluded to in their
joint work was Pena's and that his name, though subsequently dropped by Lobel, probably
came first on the title-page as that ot the senior and chief author. The dedication is dated
Christmas Eve, 1570; the colophon January 1st, 1571.
32 Historical . . . Sketches, i., p. 101.