John's Colleges; and to
ransack the bookshops of that seat of learning for such works as
might be procurable in no more difficult tongue than the Latin.
In this way Captain Barker became possessed of a vast number of
monkish herbals, Pliny's _Historia Naturalis_, the _Herbarum Vivas
Eicones_ of Brunsfels, the treatises of Tragus, Fuchsius, Matthiolus,
Ebn Beithar and Conrad Gesner, the _Stirpium Adversaria Nova_ and
_Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia_ of Matthew Lobel, with the works
of such living botanists as Henshaw, Hook, Grew and Malpighi.
As the Captain had no thought of resuming a seafaring life,
he felt confident of digesting in time these masses of learning,
though it annoyed him at first to find himself capable of
understanding but a tenth of what he read. On summer evenings he
would sit out on the lawn, with a folio balanced on his knee, and do
violence to Mr. Swiggs's ears with such learned terms as
"Boraginiae," "Cucurbitaceae," "Leguminosae," and as winter drew in,
master and man would hold long consultations indoors over certain
plants, the portraits of which in the herbals seemed familiar enough,
though their habitats often proved, on further reading, to lie no
nearer than Arabia Felix or the Spice Islands.
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