HISTORY OF ESSEX BOTANY. 220
PELECYPODA.
EULAMELLIBRANCHIATA.
Family—Cyremdae.
Pisidium pusillum, Gmelin. J. B. Coll. (W.H.D.)
Specimens from John Brown's collection illustrating many
of the species which Mr. Dalton presented, were already in
the Club's series, and sets of many picked out from material
given by Mr. W. Whitaker, F.R.S., were arranged by the writer
when first he worked out the Club's Copford shells.
HISTORY OF ESSEX BOTANY.
By Prof. G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S., Vice-President.
Part I. (continued from p. 184).
The Botanists of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries.
William How, or Howe, was born in London in 1620,
entered Merchant Taylor's School in 1632, and St. John's
College, Oxford, in 1637, graduating as B.A. in 1641, and
proceeding M.A. in 1644. He began the study of medicine, but
took up arms in the King's behalf, and was given the command
of a troop of horse. On the downfall of the royalist cause he
began to practice medicine in London, first in St. Lawrence
Lane, and afterwards in Milk Street, Cheapside ; but, though
commonly called Dr. How, he does not seem to have taken a
doctor's degree. He died at Milk Street, August 30th, 1656, and
was buried in the churchyard of St. Margaret's, Westminster,
leaving behind him, as Antony a Wood says, a "choice library of
books of his faculty, and the character of a noted herbalist.'' In
1650 he published anonymously Phytologia Britannica natalcs
exhibens indigenarum Stirpium sponte emergentium, in 134 pp., 8vo.,
a work first attributed to him by Merret.39 This little work is
noteworthy as the first exclusively British flora ; but, though it
enumerates 1220 plants, mostly spermaphytes, it is far from
critically accurate, Ray enumerating more than thirty species
recorded in it which had no claim to be considered indigenous.
The Essex records in it are seven in number, viz.:—
39 "Pinax," 1666 ; Epistola ad Lectorem A2.