One important alteration had been made before the blocks were used again after the Bohemian edition of 1562; namely, that the initials G. S. (sometimes with an engraver's tool either above, below, or to one side), which occur on over one hundred of the blocks, had been carefully removed, with the single exception (as far as I have noted) of those on the woodcut of Fabaria; here the initials are on the root of the plant, and somewhat obscured by shading. It is interesting to note in this connexion, that Prof. R. G. Hatton, in his fine book The Craftsman's Plant-Book, London, 1909 (in which all the larger illustrations are reproduced from either the 1565 Venice edition of Mattioli or the 1542 edition of Fuchs's herbal), notes that the drawing of the Orange bears the initials W. S. on one of the leaves. This is the only occurrence of these initials I have found in this herbal; they are found in all the editions with the large figures. Hatton also says: 'I have not seen any opinion as to who was the draughtsman or the engraver of these cuts.' The names of the two artists have been given by Mattioli himself, in the Epistola nuncupatoria to the 1565 edition, as Georgius Liberalis homo artis pingendi peritissimus, et post ipsum Volfangus Meierpeck Misnensis in the Italian editions they are styled 'M. Giorgio Liberale da Udine' and 'M. Volfango Maierpeck Todesco'. Of these two artists I am unable to trace any particulars; though Bryan, Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, mentions a Gennesio (or Gensio) Liberale, a painter of the Venetian School, born at Udine, who flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century, and was a painter of animals and fish.

and

As to the identity of G. S. and W. S., there seems to be no direct evidence. The authorities who deal with monograms mention several G. S.'s as unknown wood-engravers; but among them there is one who is supposed to have worked in Prague from 1550 to 1570, and who cut the blocks for the Bohemian Bible printed by Melantrichus. One might wildly

conjecture that this printer with the high-sounding name may have been a German named Schwartzhaar, and that he was the wood-cutter; but that would be mere conjecture. In Brulliot's Dictionnaire des Monogrammes, Munich, 1832, I found the following amusing reference to these initials:

'Suivant Papillon (T. 1. p. 228) on trouve aussi les lettres 'G. S. sur des gravures en bois pour les Commentaires de 'Mathiole sur Dioscoride, et entr'autres au bas, a droite, d'un 'crocodile.'

To mistake an engraver's tool for a crocodile shows a superabundance of imagination on the part of a monogrammist !

A system of shading the drawings in this herbal by a very skilful use of parallel lines, with occasional cross-hatchings, is employed, and is often used with great delicacy. In some instances the dark green of leaves is well suggested by shading them with closely-placed black dots, arranged with such regularity as to suggest that a special tool was used.

The failure in the hand-colouring of herbals, which must have been as apparent to contemporaries as to us, perhaps suggested the need of substituting shading for crude colouring. It was certainly an advance in botanic illustration to employ a well-regulated system of shading of the kind mentioned, since colour could only be rightly applied to outline-drawings by skilled artists.

The drawings in this Bohemian herbal are not uniformly good (in none of the old herbals are they so), but there is no denying that many of them are remarkably fine and vigorous. The feeling for decoration is very strong in them; and their placing on the pages in conjunction with the gothic text is admirable. Botanic artists of to-day, in addition to studying the drawings in Brunfels's and Fuchs's herbals, would do well to consider the large woodcuts in many of Mattioli's editions, preferably those of 1562, 1563, and 1565.

6

Postscript: Since writing the above, I have chanced upon a somewhat remarkable fact in connexion with these large woodcuts. A considerable number of the blocks illustrating the 1562 Bohemian edition of Mattioli were actually used in 1755 to illustrate a work published in Paris : Duhamel du Monceau's Traité des Arbres et Arbustes qui se cultivent en France en pleine terre. In his preface (p. x, footnote) he records the fact :

J'ai eu le bonheur de recouvrer presque toutes les planches 'de la belle édition latine du Matthiole de Valgrise: les Imprimeurs de mon Ouvrage ont fait graver avec soin celles quí y manquoient; entre celles-ci il s'en trouve plusieurs qui 'n'avoient point été représentées jusqu'à présent dans les livres de Botanique, ou qui l'étoient fort mal, n'ayant été dessinées sur des plantes seches.'

It is interesting to note the inferiority in design of the eighteenth-century woodcuts in this work, compared with those of the sixteenth century. The paper used in 1755 was an exceptionally good one for these blocks; and comparing these impressions with the very poor ones of the 1604 Valgrisi edition of Mattioli, one cannot but wonder, not only at the vast difference made by the use of good paper and good ink in printing woodcuts, but also at the great durability of the old wood-blocks, for in this case a period of one hundred and ninety-two years had elapsed since their first use in 1562. This is, I believe, a record time for the extended use of botanic wood-blocks.

THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE

T

MARKS OF QUOTATION

BY DOUGLAS C. McMURTRIE

HERE has been but little study or research concerning the history of typography, regarded from the point of view of printers' practice. Most of the histories of printing are biographical or bibliographical in character. There appears to be need of a history which will disclose the origin and development through transitional stages of the features of practice adopted and followed by the printers of to-day.

This would be an ambitious project, but it seems that the first steps in preparation for it would be the investigation by a number of students in various countries of individual features of typographical practice.

The feature which I have undertaken to study and report upon is the origin and development of the marks of quotation. As is well known, the practice of printers in any country in indicating quoted passages differs from those in almost every other country. Thus, the French printers use one type of quotation marks; the Italian printers use another; the Germans a third; the Dutch a fourth. There is even difference in style between the printers of England and the United States.

It will also be found that the practice in any country is not what it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and the evolution of practice in each country is both interesting and illuminating.

As there is practically no information on the subject of quotation marks in the existing literature on printing, the only method of study is the examination of hundreds of volumes