The first portion of this volume contains the manuscript of a talk given by Harveian librarian Joseph Frank Payne (1840–1910) to the Royal College of Physicians. The purpose of the speech (ca.75 typescript pages), given 21 January 1901, was to “describe the earliest printed books in European literature devoted to the illustration of Natural History; to fix the date and order of the several works known by the names of ‘Herbarius’ and ‘Hortus Sanitatis’; to show their connection with one another, and with some other works of the same class.” There are also handwritten changes and corrections in the text, the former probably by Payne and the latter by a reader(?). The speech was published in the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, London, Volume 6, pp. 63–126.

The second part of the volume contains a copy (62 carbon typescript pages) of an anonymous translation of Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber’s (1855–1932) Die Kräuterbücher des XV und XVI Jahrhunderts (The Herbals of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; Munchen, 1924).