The "Tractatus de herbis", reproduced here, is one of the many rare and precious manuscripts in the collections of the British Library. It is an illustrated herbal which comes from a collection of pharmacological texts written in southern Italy around AD 1300AD, which is now known as British Library Egerton MS 747.;This herbal is particularly significant as it is the first surviving, and probably the original, manuscript of the "Tractatus de herbis", a type of herbal which was to become one of the most influential texts on medicinal plants between the 14th and 16th centuries. It contains a vast corpus of information about plants and their medicinal uses, inherited from Greek, Roman and Arabic sources, and combines this with paintings of plants which, in their observation of nature, anticipate for the first time modern botanical illustration.;This "Tractatus de herbis" is also of interest because, for the first time since Antiquity, the artist actually looked at the plants and drew them