Herbals deal primarily with medicinal and culinary herbs, their real and supposed properties and virtues, and in origin they go back at least to the Ancient Greeks. During the 16th and 17th centuries they developed into attractively illustrated printed books, the forerunners of modern botanical and pharmaceutical textbooks. Agnes Arber's Herbals (first published in 1912, much revised in 1938) stands as the major survey of the period 1470 to 1670 when botany evolved into a scientific discipline separate from herbalism, a development reflected in contemporary herbals. Every work on herbals...