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The Germans were the first to append woodcuts to their botanical descriptions, and it is Otto Brunfelsius, in 1530, who has the credit of being the originator of such figures. In 1554 there was published the first great Herbal, that of Rembertus Dodonaeus, body-physician to the Emperor Maximilian II., who wrote in Dutch.

'The Innocents Abroad' is eminently readable, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism, its remarkably accurate and detailed information, and its fine descriptions. The rare quality, which made it "sell right along like the Bible," is that it is the vital record of a keen and searching intelligence.

I will not describe the dewy softness of their eyes, the catching of their breath, their murmured endearments. I could, mind you. It is at just such descriptions that I am particularly happy. But I have grown discouraged. My spirit is broken.

Novelist, an American physician, wrote three tragedies, The Gladiator, Oraloosa, and The Broker of Bogota, and several novels, including Calavar, The Infidel, The Hawks of Hawk Hollow, Peter Pilgrim, and Nick of the Woods, in the first two of which he gives graphic and accurate details and descriptions of Mexican history.

I easily induced him to read some of the books, full of the charm of Australian life, which Trevanion had sent me; and so happily did those descriptions suit his own erratic tastes, and the free, half-savage man that lay rough and large within that soldierly nature, that he himself, as it were, seemed to suggest my own ardent desire, sighed, as the careworn Trevanion had done, that "he was not my age," and blew the flame that consumed me, with his own willing breath.

The place was one of singular wildness, and its aspect brought to my mind the descriptions given by travellers of those dreary regions marking the site of degraded Babylon.

It is possible that tent life in the East, or in the Rocky Mountains, with beds, tables, travelling knick-knacks of all descriptions, and servants who study their master's whims, may be very charming; but my experience of it having been of the make-shift and non-luxurious kind, is not delectable. A wooden saddle, without stuffing, made a very fair pillow; but the ridges of the lava were severe.

For the vulgar, there were never so many poetasters as now; but though they find it no hard matter to imitate their rhyme, they yet fall infinitely short of imitating the rich descriptions of the one, and the delicate invention of the other of these masters. But what will become of our young gentleman, if he be attacked with the sophistic subtlety of some syllogism?

He had constructed vessels of all descriptions ships that sailed, and ships that didn't; gunboats which mounted a brass cannon, and peaceful merchant traders which carried cargoes of earth and stones across the water from one shore to another.

A definite engagement did not take place till some months later; but some tacit understanding must now have been allowed by Madame Hanska, as there began to appear from this time in Balzac's letters exact descriptions of the Sevres china, the inlaid furniture, and the bric-a-brac, which he was buying evidently with her money as well as his own, to adorn their future home together.