62 



stralis. The rich hbrary of this estabhshment contains many valu- 

 able works, which are wanting to the great universities, academies, 

 and national collections of the continent. The hall in which the 

 meetings of the Society are held, struck us as being a far finer 

 apartment than the House of Commons ; and we even thought this 

 latter very inferior to the House of Commons at Munich, which is 

 only used every third year ; while again the Hall of Assembly of the 

 Academy at Munich is a mere lumber-room compared with that of 

 the Linnsean Society. The busts of Linnseus and Banks, and of our 

 countryman Trew, and the portraits of Solander and Pulteney, orna- 

 ment this elegant apartment. All that we were, unfortunately, able 

 to see of Sir J. Banks's herbarium and library was from the windows 

 of the Linnsean Society's house ; for Sir Robert Brown was gone to 

 Naples, and had taken with him thekey of the Banksian collection*. 

 We were more successful at Count Lambert's, though with the dis- 

 appointment of not finding at home this venerable sage of seventy 

 years, who has made such sacrifices to botany. He was at his 

 country-seat of Boyton in Wiltshire, some eighty miles, we were told, 

 distant from the capital. Mr. Don, however, had the key to Lambert's 

 sanctum ; and his goodness afforded us a view of its botanical trea- 

 sures, accumulated from all parts of the world. The collection of 

 plants contains above 36,000 species ; and if its increase continues 

 with its former giant strides, it will soon exceed every other. This 

 immense herbarium, of which the noble proprietor has given some 

 information in the second part of his magnificent work on the genus 

 Pinus, consists of no fewer than fifty herbaria, each of which would 

 singly be worth to a botanist more than any pearl in the Mogul's 

 crown. I shall here only mention a few of them, besides the great 

 English one, of the Count's own formation: viz. the plants of Afzelius 

 and Balduinus; the collection made by Baxter in New Holland ; the 

 herbaria of Broussonet, Brown (the author of a work on the botany 



* We really think that it would have been quite an overstretching of that public- 

 spirited liberality, with which both the former and the present proprietor of the 

 Banksian collection have ever opened its treasures to the use of science, if Sir 

 Robert Brown, when going to Italy, had thought it necessary to leave the key of 

 Sir J. Banks's library and herbarium in the door. — Ed. 



