AiMERicAN Botany. cS3 



Botany in this country began with the pioneers, not recog- 

 nized, perhaps, but nevertheless in reaUty. The years of explor- 

 ation were years also of collection, description, experimental 

 cultivation and tentative classification. The romantic figures 

 of j\Iichau and Rafinesque were in much more sober company. 

 It is gratifying to know that many of the older botanists, pure 

 systematists though they were, had gardens as well as herbaria, 

 and studied living plants as assiduously as they preserved the 

 dead. jNfichaux, Frenchman and explorer, established a garden 

 in Charleston, South Carolina, in which he planted trees and 

 shrubs of his collecting, preliminary to taking such as might be 

 suitable to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. All traces of this 

 garden seem now to have disappeared, but it and Darlington's 

 near Philadelphia, and Bartram's in Philadelphia, were prob- 

 ably the earliest of a distinctly botanical character in this coun- 

 trv. There was, however, an important difference between them 

 perhaps not realized at the time by their makers. Darlington, 

 descendant of a line of Quakers, practicing physician and public 

 spirited citizen of the town and county of Chester, Pennsylvania, 

 interested himself in collecting all the native flowering plants of 

 his neighborhood, and kept them for further study and enjoy- 

 ment either as dried and mounted specimens, or as inhabitants 

 of his garden. Michaux, on the other hand, foreigner, wanderer, 

 explorer, collected over extensive areas, crossing the mountains 

 into Tennessee and Kentucky and getting the plants which he 

 could keep alive in his acclimatization garden. The Jardin 

 d'Acclimatation of Paris is of later origin than Michaux's, but 

 the aims of its founders were much the same as his. This early 

 difference in botanical gardens has continued to this day; some 

 are estabUshed and orderly, others are changing and experi- 

 mental. Beginning on one coast, they have stretched across 

 the continent in less than a century as private, public, or educa- 

 tional needs and enterprise called them into existence and fos- 

 tered their development. 



The botanical garden of the city of vSan Francisco, known as 

 the Golden Gate Park, is a fine example of a municipal park con- 

 ducted on scientific lines and contributing to the scientific as 

 well as to the aesthetic education, and to the enjoyment, of the 

 public. It is not a research garden, nor so intended — in this re- 



