[Vol. 2 



204 ANNALS OF THE MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN 



for the better encouraging and enabling the said Society to 

 support the charge thereof, for the manifestation of the 

 power, wisdom, and glory of God in the works of the creation, 

 and that their Apprentices and others might better distinguish 

 good and useful plants from those that bore resemblance to 

 them, and yet were hurtful and other the like good purposes." 1 



The utilization of the Garden for the sole purpose of grow- 

 ing medicinal plants to be converted into drugs for the 

 Society's use was prohibited by Sir Hans Sloane's deed of 

 gift, and he definitely encouraged the science of botany by 

 making it a condition that fifty specimens of distinct plants, 

 well dried and preserved, which grew in their garden that 

 same year, with their names and reputed names, were to be 

 delivered yearly to the President and Fellows of the Royal 

 Society of London, "until the number of two thousand had 

 been attained." He also enjoined that the plants so presented 

 in each year were to be specifically different from those pre- 

 sented in every former year; and this injunction was more 

 than faithfully carried out by the Society. 2 



The Garden achieved some notoriety in having been the 

 first garden in England where the Cedar of Lebanon was 

 planted; the final survivor of the four placed there in 1683 

 was only removed in the year 1904. 



John Evelyn, who visited the Garden in 1685, was impressed 

 by the heating arrangement of the greenhouses, then quite an 

 innovation. "What was very ingenious," he remarks in his 

 diary, "was the subterranean heate conveyed by a stove under 

 the conservatory, which was all vaulted with bricks, so as he 

 has the doores and windows open in the hardest frosts, seclud- 

 ing only the snow." An arrangement far more efficient and 

 useful than the remarkable open fire-baskets formerly in use 

 at Oxford. 



1 Perrfrles, P. E. F. London Botanic Gardens. Wellcome Chemical Research 



Laboratories, London, Publ. 62: p. 57. London, 1906 (transferred from the 

 present to the past tense). 



2 . Johnson, G. W. History of English gardening p. 150. London, 1820. 



3 



3 



John Watts, appointed gardener in 1680. 



