THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 103 



Very soon after the founding of the gardens at Padua, 

 there were introduced into them, plants other than those of 

 merely medicinal value. This was doubtless due to the re- 

 vival of interest in plants themselves and the desire for col- 

 lecting them from other lands, which seem to have been 

 awakened in the middle of the sixteenth century by the then 

 recent geographical discoveries. 



From this time onwards there appears to have been a 

 kind of rivalry between the various gardens as to which could 

 grow the greatest number of plants collected from all parts of 

 the world. Along with the interest aroused in the collection 

 and cultivation of all kinds of plants, there was also displayed 

 great interest in the description and illustration of them. Not 

 to speak of many such herbals published on the Continent, 

 there are the famous ones of Gerard, Tfadescant and Parkin- 

 son in England, the authors of which must not only have been 

 most successful gardeners, but very patient and exact observ- 

 ers also. 



Thus we come to the foundation in the seventeenth cen- 

 tury of gardens by private or municipal benefactions for the 

 purpose of allowing the public to observe and study plant life. 

 This leads us to the establishment of the greatest of all bo- 

 tanic gardens, the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, in the 

 eighteenth century and its like in many cities of Europe and 

 their descendants or copies all over the civilized world. 



The first botanical garden in the tropics seems to have 

 been that of the island of St. Vincent, founded by the British 

 Government in 1764. But the magnificent gardens of Buiten- 

 zorg in Java at Calcutta and at Peradeniya in Ceylon, together 

 with that at Rio de Janeiro are striking examples of the bene- 

 fits such gardens confer upon the countries in which they are 

 situated, by the introduction of new crops, such as cinchona 

 in India and rubber in Ceylon. 



