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Our examination of lichen literature takes us back to Theophrastus, the disciple of Plato and Aristotle, who lived from 371 to 284 B.C., and who wrote a History of Plants, one of the earliest known treatises on Botany. Among the plants described by Theophrastus, there are evidently two lichens, one of which is either an Usnea or an Alectoria, and the other certainly Roccella tinctoria, the last-named an important economic plant likely to be well known for its valuable dyeing properties. The same or somewhat similar lichens are also probably alluded to by the Greek physician Dioscorides, in his work on Materia Medica, A.D. 68. About the same time Pliny the elder, who was a soldier and traveller as well as a voluminous writer, mentions them in his Natural History which was completed in 77 A.D.

During the centuries that followed, there was little study of Natural History, and, in any case, lichens were then and for a long time after considered to be of too little economic value to receive much attention.

In the sixteenth century there was a great awakening of scientific interest all over Europe, and, after the printing-press had come into general use, a number of books bearing on Botany were published. It will be necessary to chronicle only those that made distinct contributions to the knowledge of lichens.

The study of plants was at first entirely from a medical standpoint and one of the first works, and the first book on Natural History, printed in England, was the Grete Herball[27]. It was translated from a French work, Hortus sanitatis, and published by Peter Treveris in Southwark. One of the herbs recommended for various ailments is “Muscus arborum,” the tree-moss (Usnea). A somewhat crude figure accompanies the text.

Ruel[28] of Soissons in France, Dorstenius[29], Camerarius[30] and Tabernaemontanus[31] in Germany followed with works on medical or economic botany and they described, in addition to the tree-moss, several species of reputed value in the art of healing now known as Sticta (Lobaria) pulmonaria, Lobaria laetevirens, Cladonia pyxidata, Evernia prunastri and Cetraria islandica. Meanwhile L’Obel[32], a Fleming, who spent the latter part of his life in England and is said to have had charge of a physic garden at Hackney, was appointed botanist to James I. He published at Antwerp a large series of engravings of plants, and added a species of Ramalina to the growing list of recognized lichens. Dodoens[33], also a Fleming, records not only the Usnea of trees, but a smaller and more slender black form which is easily identifiable as Alectoria jubata. He also figures Lichen pulmonaria and gives the recipe for its use.

The best-known botanical book published at that time, however, is the Herball of John Gerard[34] of London, Master in Chirurgerie, who had a garden in Holborn. He recommends as medicinally valuable not only Usnea, but also Cladonia pyxidata, for which he coined the name “cuppe- or chalice-moss.” About the same time Schwenckfeld[35] recorded, among plants discovered by him in Silesia, lichens now familiar as Alectoria jubata, Cladonia rangiferina and a species of Peltigera.

Among the more important botanical writers of the seventeenth century may be cited Colonna[36] and Bauhin[37]. The former, an Italian, contributes, in his Ecphrasis, descriptions and figures of three additional species easily recognized as Physcia ciliaris, Xanthoria parietina and Ramalina calicaris. Kaspar Bauhin, a professor in Basle, who was one of the most advanced of the older botanists, was the first to use a binomial nomenclature for some of his plants. He gives a list in his Pinax of the lichens with which he was acquainted, one of them, Cladonia fimbriata, being a new plant.

John Parkinson’s[38] Herball is well known to English students; he adds one new species for England, Lobaria pulmonaria, already recorded on the Continent. Parkinson was an apothecary in London and held the office of the King’s Herbarist; his garden was situated in Long Acre. How’s[39] Phytographia is notable as being the first account of British plants compiled without reference to their healing properties. Five of the plants described by him are lichen species: “Lichen arborum sive pulmonaria” (Lobaria pulmonaria), “Lichen petraeus tinctorius” (Roccella), “Muscus arboreus” (Usnea), “Corallina montana” (Cladonia rangiferina) and “Muscus pixoides” (Cladonia). Several other British species were added by Merrett[40], who records in his Pinax, “Muscus arboreus umbilicatus” (Physcia ciliaris), “Muscus aureus tenuissimus” (Teloschistes flavicans), “Muscus caule rigido” (Alectoria) and “Lichen petraeus purpureus” (Parmelia omphalodes), the last-named, a rock lichen, being used, he tells us, for dyeing in Lancashire.

Merret or Merrett was librarian to the Royal College of Physicians. His Pinax was undertaken to replace How’s Phytographia published sixteen years previously and then already out of print. Merrett’s work was issued in 1666, but the first impression was destroyed in the great fire of London and most of the copies now extant are dated 1667. He arranged the species of plants in alphabetical order, but as the work was not critical it fell into disuse, being superseded by John Ray’s Catalogus and Synopsis. To Robert Plot[41] we owe the earliest record of Cladonia coccifera which had hitherto escaped notice; it was described and figured as a new and rare plant in the Natural History of Staffordshire[41]. Plot was the first Custos of Ashmole’s Museum in Oxford and he was also the first to prepare a County Natural History.

The greatest advance during this first period was made by Robert Morison[42], a Scotsman from Aberdeen. He studied medicine at Angers in France, superintended the Duke of Orleans’ garden at Blois, and finally, after his return to this country in 1669, became Keeper of the botanic garden at Oxford. In the third volume of his great work[42] on Oxford plants, which was not issued till after his death, the lichens are put in a separate group—“Musco-fungus”—and classified with some other plants under “Plantae Heteroclitae.” The publication of the volume projects into the next historical period.

Long before this date John Ray had begun to study and publish books on Botany. His Catalogue of English Plants[43] is considered to have commenced a new era in the study of the science. The Catalogue was followed by the History of Plants[44], and later by a Synopsis of British Plants[45], and in all of these books lichens find a place. Two editions of the Synopsis appeared during Ray’s lifetime, and to the second there is added an Appendix contributed by Samuel Doody which is entirely devoted to Cryptogamic plants, including not a few lichens—still called “Mosses”—discovered for the first time. Doody, himself an apothecary, took charge of the garden of the Apothecaries’ Society at Chelsea, but his chief interest was Cryptogamic Botany, a branch of the subject but little regarded before his day. Pulteney wrote of him as the “Dillenius of his time.”

Among Doody’s associates were the Rev. Adam Buddle, James Petiver and William Sherard. Buddle was primarily a collector and his herbarium is incorporated in the Sloane Herbarium at the British Museum. It contains lichens from all parts of the world, many of them contributed by Doody, Sherard and Petiver. Only a few of them bear British localities: several are from Hampstead where Buddle had a church.

The Society of Apothecaries had been founded in 1617 and the members acquired land on the river-front at Chelsea, which was extended later and made into a Physick Garden. James Petiver[46] was one of the first Demonstrators of Plants to the Society in connection with the garden, and one of his duties was to conduct the annual herborizing tours of the apprentices in search of plants. He thus collected a large herbarium on the annual excursions, as well as on shorter visits to the more immediate neighbourhood of London. He wrote many tracts on Natural History subjects, and in these some lichens are included. He was one of the best known of Ray’s correspondents, and owing to his connection with the Physic Garden received plants from naturalists in foreign countries.

Sherard, another of Doody’s friends, had studied abroad under Tournefort and was full of enthusiasm for Natural Science. It was he who brought Dillenius to England and finally nominated him for the position of the first Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford. Another well-known contemporary botanist was Leonard Plukenet[47] who had a botanical garden at Old Palace Yard, Westminster. He wrote several botanical works in which lichens are included.

Morison is the only one of all the botanists of the time who recognized lichens as a group distinct from mosses, algae or liverworts, and even he had very vague ideas as to their development. Malpighi[48] had noted the presence of soredia on the thallus of some species, and regarded them as seeds. Porta[49], a Neapolitan, has been quoted by Krempelhuber as probably the first to discover and place on record the direct growth of lichen fronds from green matter on the trunks of trees.