THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



NOVEMBEE, 1905. 



THE BOTANICAL GARDEN AT BUITENZORG, JAVA. 



By Professor FRANCIS RAMALEY, Ph.D , 



THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO. 



HP) BOB ABLY the term 'botanical garden' brings to the minds of 

 -*- most people something in the style of a cemetery with a few 

 trees and a great many oblong beds of herbaceous plants, each bed 

 with a white label suggesting a small gravestone. In a properly ap- 

 pointed botanical garden most people expect to see also some hot 

 houses for orchids and a tank with warmed water for tropical water 

 lilies and lotus. 



Should an ordinary mortal, or even a botanist, be dropped from a 

 balloon into the middle of the garden at Buitenzorg, he would, for a 

 time, hardly appreciate that he was in a botanical garden. The usual 

 ' ear marks ' of such an institution are certainly not apparent at first 

 glance. The plants are mostly trees, no warm tanks are necessary, 

 and there are cool houses instead of hot houses. The botanist, in 

 looking at the names of trees would only now and then recognize one 

 he had run across somewhere in a text-book. Were it not for a very 

 few names, he might believe he had landed on some other planet. 

 Certain it is he would see few plants he had known before in the 

 temperate zone. 



After a time spent at Buitenzorg the term 'plant' no longer suggests 

 a small green creature with pretty flowers — something which dies down 

 in autumn and comes up at Easter time. The plants at Buitenzorg 

 are trees, and there are hundreds, nay, thousands, of these ; while only 

 a trifling space is allotted to puny little herbs — the things that Ave of 

 the temperate regions know as ' plants.' 



Of course the well informed naturalist knows the tropical world as 

 the ' mother of life/ and he expects to see a wealth of green, a super- 



