30 INTRODUCTION 



Professor Balfour,* unfortunately, was not with us long enough 

 to carry through all his intended reforms, but the Report pub- 

 lished by him upon the state of the Garden was of assistance to 

 those who came after. The systematic herbaceous beds were 

 remodelled under his direction. 



The changes were not popular with every one, but they 

 hardly merited the biting words of Tuckwell : " New brooms 

 swept the unique old Garden clean ; young men arose who 

 knew not Joseph ; young men in a hurry to produce a little 

 Kew upon the incongruous Cherwell banks. So Baxter fils 

 was cashiered, the Linnean borders razed, the monumental 

 plants uprooted." 



With the appointments of Dr. Vines as Professor and of 

 Mr. Baker as Curator in 1888, a new era may be said to have 

 commenced. The University, after turning deaf ears to the 

 reports of Committees and Professors for a score of years, at 

 length voted the much-needed money for new Glass-houses. 



In 1889 a Seed-list was compiled by Mr. Baker, and was 

 printed and circulated far more widely than its predecessor 

 200 years before. The advantage to the Garden was great 

 and immediate in fact, in the first year the Garden received 

 880 plants and 930 packets of seeds. The labour involved by 

 this branch of garden work alone may be gathered from Mr. 

 Baker's figures published with the Curators' annual reports, 

 from which it appears that in the twenty-one years since the 

 appearance of the annual Seed-list the Garden has distributed 

 12,827 plants, 2,416 bulbs, and 69,721 packets of seeds 

 receiving in exchange 10,887 plants, 3,148 bulbs, and 37,149 

 packets of seeds. 



During the same period the increase of the Medical School, 

 and, more recently, the transference to Oxford of the School 



* Born 1853 ; M.D. Edin., D.Sc., F.R.S. ; Regius Professor of Botany, 

 Glasgow, 1879-84 ; Sherardian Professor, Oxford, 1884-8 ; Regius 

 Professor of Botany, Edinburgh, and King's Botanist in Scotland, since 

 1888. 



