172 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



BOTANIC GARDENS. 



By D. T. MACDOUGAL, 

 assistant pbofessoe of botany in the state university of minnesota. 



I. ORIGIN AND GENERAL ORGANIZATION. 



THE term botanic garden is used to designate a limited area of 

 ground on which is grown a collection of plants of a large 

 number of species, arranged in a manner that will subserve some 

 educational, aesthetic, scientific, or economic purpose. At the 

 present time the utilitarian feature embraces the chief design of 

 but few gardens, yet it is to the economic purpose that these in- 

 stitutions owe their origin. It will be interesting in this connec- 

 tion to note the successive changes of organization by which these 

 institutions, at first as directly practical as possible, have come to 

 subserve the most complex and highly scientific uses. 



After the discovery of the medical properties of plants, it must 

 have followed, in course of time, that representatives of the 

 species to which remedial properties were attributed should be 

 collected and grown in some place conveniently and readily 

 accessible as need demanded. The last step did not immediately 

 follow, however, since, among the conditions which were earlier 

 supposed to influence the potency of medicinal herbs, the locality in 

 which grown and the mysteries attending their collection were of 

 the greatest importance. The first authentic record of the intro- 

 duction of medicinal plants into cultivated plots of ground dates 

 no further back than the time of the elder Pliny (23-79 a. d.), 

 who writes of the garden of Antonius Castor, at Rome, in which 

 were grown a large number of medicinal plants. This step may 

 have been taken much earlier by the Greeks, Chinese, or Mexi- 

 cans, however. Later the Benedictine monks of northern Italy 

 paid great attention to the growing of remedial herbs, and devoted 

 an important proportion of the monastery gardens to this purpose. 

 This practice was also carried beyond the Alps, and in 1020 a 

 garden was in existence at the monastery of St. Gall, in Switzer- 

 land, a few kilometres distant from Lake Constance, which con- 

 tained sixteen plots occupied by medicinal plants. A garden of 

 this character was founded in 1309, at Salerno, and another in 

 Venice in 1330. In 1309 the Benedictine monks founded an acad- 

 emy called " Civitas Hippocratica " at Monte Cassino, in Campania, 

 which appears to the writer to be among the earliest, if not the 

 first, school of medicine, and established in connection with it a 

 " physics garden." Two centuries later, courses of lectures on 

 the " simples," as the unmixed preparations of herbs were termed, 

 were given in the greater number of Italian universities, under 



