102 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



had the idea of a real botanic garden, seeing that it is clear 

 that several of their early rulers despatched collectors to dis- 

 tant countries to bring back plants which were cultivated for 

 their economic or medicinal value. From a list of plants thus 

 introduced by the Emperor Wu Ti in the second century B. C, 

 the banana and the sweet orange have been identified along 

 with many others by modern scholars. 



Coming to a more recent period of history we have an 

 exact contemporary description of a monastic garden of the 

 ninth century with its attendant "Physic Garden," which was 

 the direct origin of the gardens estal)lished in connection with 

 the medical faculties of the Italian universities of later cen- 

 turies. 



As the monks were bound to live for the most part on 

 pulse, vegetables and fruit, the cultivation of the monastery 

 garden was of the greatest importance to them. It is diffi- 

 cult to speak too highly of the debt which botanical science 

 owes to the care the monks of the middle ages took of their 

 gardens and to their knowledge of drugs and plants. 



Then came the Renaissance with its great revival and 

 widespread interest in science of every kind, not least in that 

 of botany. With a real growth in the knowledge of plants 

 and their uses, there grew up also a great number of ridiculous 

 or superstitious beliefs about plants, which accurate investiga- 

 tion and experiment have entirely dispelled. Then were 

 founded the physic gardens attached to the medical faculties 

 of the universities, one of which, at Padua, founded in 1545, 

 still exists in very nearly its original plan. These physic gar- 

 dens gave students of medicine an opportunity of studying 

 the plants from whicli they compounded their drugs and were 

 also a source from which they might obtain such plants in their 

 future priictice. t 



