A lovely first edition of an uncommon and handsome work on plants and their medical uses. Octavo: 16 unnumbered leaves, 849 pages, 14 unnumbered leaves (second blank) : add. engr. title page, folded tables. In lovely contemporary vellum. Guy de La Brosse (1586 – 1641 in Paris), was a French botanist, medical doctor, and pharmacist. A physician to King Louis XIII of France, he is also notable for the creation of a major botanical garden of medicinal herbs, which was commissioned by the king. This garden, the Jardin des Plantes (originally Jardin du Roi) was the first botanical garden in Paris, and the second in France (after the Montpellier garden created in 1593). Guy de La Brosse, medical doctor to Louis XIII, obtained royal permission on 6 July 1626 to found, in Paris, a herb garden destined to culture plants useful to medicine to replace those of Montpellier created by Henri IV. But this project took some time to come to fruition since the Faculty of Medicine in Paris considered the garden as competition to their activities, because La Brosse wished to teach botany and chemistry there. This garden, called "Jardin du roi" (Garden of the King), would not be officially inaugurated until 1640, more than 5 years after its actual creation. To calm the university faculty, the king only authorised one teacher without diploma at the garden, with this choice being left to the garden supervisor. This work and its author are treated and celebrated in Agnes Arber's classic 1913 article: (January 1913). "The Botanical Philosophy of Guy de la Brosse: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Thought". Isis. 1 (3): 359–369. From the important library of Dr Maurice Villaret.