Biographies Médicales et Scientifiques, XVIIIe Siècle

because he came from a region famous above all for its portrait painters?; and so on, and so on. When he is not busy posing questions, Herrlinger does his best to provide answers. For example, he demonstrates the persistence of classical motifs through the Middle Ages (citing an eleventh-century Byzantine MS in the Laurentian Library, Florence) and into the Rennaissance (e.g. Vidius Vidius); he discerns similarities between the title page of the Fabrica and a woodcut in Terence's Comoediae, 1497; he is disinclined to adopt a belittling attitude towards Estienne and other pre-Vesalian anatomists, and indeed goes out of his way to establish the modernity of Lorenz Phryes (1518) by contrasting his illustrations with the medieval-like woodcuts of Magnus Hundt (1501); he makes an informed but all too brief investigation of Leonardo's artistic techniques; he compares the copper plates of Eustachius with the woodcuts of Vesalius, and studies plagiarists of the latter; and to round things off he prints a selection of title-pages from sixteenth-entury medical books, relating them to contemporary developments in art. To all this, Dr. F. N. L. Poynter contributes an affectionate and lucidly written 'In Memoriam'. The book is technically well produced; the colour plates are excellent, and G. Fulton-Smith's English translation reads fluently. There is only one flaw: the chart from Singer's article 'The herbal in antiquity' (Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1927) has been printed with the legends in German, and not-as one would expect in this translation-from the original English. E. GASKELL