LUTNEAN SOCrETT OF LONDON. Xl 



his observation : he is therefore obliged to triist to labels ; these are 

 often mismatched by accident or by the carelessness of the workmen 

 employed : or, again, one seed has been sown and another has come 

 up in its place, or a perennial has perished and made room for a 

 sucker or seedling from an adjoining species. The misnomers arising 

 from these and other causes have become perpetuated and sanctioned 

 by directors who, for want of adequate libraries or herbaria, or 

 sometimes for want of experience or ability, have been unable to 

 detect them. Plants have also been so disguised or essentially 

 altered by cultivation, that it has become difficult to recognize their 

 identity ; and new varieties or hybrids, which, if left to themselves, 

 would have succumbed to some of the innumerable causes of de- 

 struction they are constantly exposed to in a wild state, have been 

 preserved and propagated through the protective care of the culti- 

 vator, and pronounced at once to be new species. If, moreover, a 

 misplaced label indicates that the seed has been received from a 

 country where no plants of a similar type are known to grow, the 

 director readily notes it as a new genus, and, proud of the disco- 

 very, gives it a name and appends a so-called diagnosis to his next 

 seed-catalogue, adding one more to the numerous puzzles with which 

 the science is encumbered. So far, indeed, had this nuisance been 

 carried in several Continental gardens, in the earlier portion of the 

 present century, that, excepting perhaps Fischer and Meyer's and a 

 few other first-rate indexes, the great majority, perhaps nine-tenths, 

 of the new species published in these catalogues have proved un- 

 tenable ; and from my own experience I am now obliged a priori to 

 set down as doubtful every species established on a garden-plant 

 without confirmation from wild specimens. Fortunately, the custom 

 is now abating, and directors of botanic gardens are beginning to 

 perceive that they do not add to their reputation by having their 

 names appended to those of bad species. 



Living collections of plants, or botanical gardens, are of much 

 older date than zoological ones, and since the sixteenth century 

 have been attached to the principal universities which have medical 

 schools, that of Padua dating from 1525, that of Pisa from 1544, 

 and of Montpellier from 1597. The Jardiu des Plautes of Paris, 

 which in botany even more than in zoology so long reigned supreme, 

 was established in 1610, our own first one, at Oxford, in 1632. 

 These university gardens, having been generally more or less under 

 the control of eminent resident botanists, have contributed very 

 largely to the means of studying the structure and affinities of 

 plants, especially in those Continental cities where a milder or more 



