8 
future. Emphasis is placed on the section of medicinal plants, 
used in connection with the instruction of classes in pharmacy and 
medicine. A “garden of simples” existed in Naples as early as 
1062. The establishment of the real botanic garden of the present 
was decreed in 1796, but was not actually begun until 1809, under 
the direction of Michele Tenove, who continued as its director 
from 1810 to 1860. The largest section is the arboretum. 
Pisa 
The garden next visited was the Reale Orto Botanico della R. 
Universita di Pisa. Whether the Padua or the Pisa garden is the 
older is a disputed point. According to C. Fedeli (Atti Soc. Tose. 
sc. nat. proc. verb. p. xxvu, pp. 8-20, 1918) the Pisa garden was 
founded in 1544, one year before Padua, but Roberto De Visiani, 
director of the Padua garden from 1836 to 1878, and his successor 
Pier Andrea Saccardo, insist on a later date (subsequent to 1545). 
Mattiolus, in the Preface to the 1559 Italian edition of his Com- 
mentaries on Dioscorides (Lf Discorsi ne t sei Libri di Pedacio Di- 
oscoride Anagarbeo della Materia Medicinale), wrote as follows: 
eer 
a 
Che most illustrious and most serene Venetian Senate, through 
the persuasion of the most excellent college of physicians of Padua 
and other most noble and divine doctors, a few years previously 
conceived and constructed in the most beautiful city of Padua a 
sumptuous garden (giardino) for the use of the public and the em- 
bellishment of medicine. . . . Moved by that, the most excellent 
Cosmo, Duke of Florence, at the special behest of the noted physi- 
cian, Luca Ghini, has caused to be constructed another like garden 
in the very ancient city of Pisa where, due to the work of its 
founder, there are growing today many rare plants which hitherto 
had never been found in Italy—imaintained for the convenience and 
public adornment of doctors, scholars, and any others who delight 
7 
in those things. 
From this passage of a contemporary Italian botanist,? writing 
before this had become a mooted question, it would seem to be 
1 Mattioli was born in Siena, March 23, 1500, and died at Trieste in 1577. 
The passage translated above is from page 2 of the Preface of an Italian 
edition (Venice, 1559), a copy of which is in the library of the Brooklyn 
Botanic Garden. The wording of this passage varies somewhat in the dif- 
an 
ferent editions. 
