2 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



They were usually so situated that the Emperor could leave 

 one " Pfalz " in the morning and pass the night in the next. 

 Charlemagne in his "Capitulare" commands: "It is our 

 wish that the gardens contain all herbs, i. e., lilies and roses, 

 etc." He names many other flowers and vegetables, but he 

 also demands several plants which cannot thrive in Germany, 

 and can only be raised in southern Europe. How did this 

 come about? It is simply because the person (probably a 

 friar) to whom Charlemagne had delegated the compilation 

 of the list of plants, had taken the names from the ancient 

 authors Theophrast and Dioscorides, for it is a remarkable 

 fact that for nearly a thousand years the works of these two 

 Greek authors remained the authorities concerning the entire 

 knowledge of plants. Even six hundred years after Charle- 

 magne's reign all botanists in middle Europe assumed that 

 the plants which Theophrast and Dioscorides * had mentioned 

 were also indigenous to central and northern Europe. They 

 had no conception of the geographical distribution of plants. 

 It was the German botanist Fuchs, in whose honor the 

 Fuchsias are named, who first showed that the plants in 

 Germany are not always the same as in Greece or Italy. 



For the JVew World we have especially the letters of the 

 first conquerors and some later publications concerning the 

 natural history of Peru, and America in general. Examples 

 are furnished in the works of Acosta, Garcilasso de la Vega 

 and others which I have studied in the original Spanish text. 

 For North America there are also the reports of the first 

 discoverers and of later travelers, and in our times the in- 

 teresting studies of the languages of the Indians. f 



But all the literary or pictorial sources are not as important, 

 not as reliable as the seeds and other vegetable relics which 

 are found in the sepulchres of the Ancients or in their temples 

 or in the excavated cities of Pompeii, etc. 



* Asa Gray and Hammond Trumbull, Review of Alph. de Candolle's 

 " Origine des plantes cultiv^es," with annotations upon certain American 

 species. Amer. Journ. Sci., vol XXV, 1883. 



t John W. Harshberger, The Uses of Plants among the Ancient Peru- 

 vians. Bull. Mus. Sci. and Arts, Univ. Pa., vol. I, no. 3, 1898. 



