BOTANICAL GARDEN 



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gow and at the University of Utrecht. The 

 most important event in Boswell's life was his 

 introduction in 1763 to Johnson, whose writings 

 he ardently admired. The acquaintance 

 ripened into a friendship that shaped Bos- 

 well's whole career. He was admitted in 1773 

 to the Literary Club founded by Johnson, 

 which included among its members Burke, 

 Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds and David 

 Garrick. From that time on Boswell made 

 careful notes of all that his idol said and did. 

 The two made a famous visit to Scotland and 

 the Hebrides in 1773, Boswell publishing a de- 

 scription of their travels in 1785 under the 

 name Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. In 

 1791, seven years after Johnson's death, the 

 great Life appeared. This masterly work, with 

 its wealth of detail and vivid portrayal of 

 Johnson's personality, is ranked by Macaulay 

 as the first among biographies. 



BOTANICAL, botan'ikal, GARDEN, a gar- 

 den in which plants are cultivated for scientific, 

 educational, artistic or economic purposes. Un- 

 til modern times their sole aim was the cultiva- 

 tion of plants for the needs of medical science. 

 Modern botanical gardens are usually con- 

 nected with universities or are situated in 



parks under local government control, and are 

 like museums in that they aim to show as far 

 as possible the principal types of plant life 

 of the earth. Very frequently in parks they 

 are given the name of conservatories. 



In the United States there are many fine col- 

 lections of plants, but only a few bear the name 

 of botanical garden. The New York Botanical 

 Garden, occupying 250 acres in Bronx Park, 

 New York City, has the finest greenhouses on 

 the continent. The Missouri Botanical Gar- 

 dens of Saint Louis, the botanic gardens of 

 Cambridge, Mass., and the Arnold Arboretum 

 at Brookline, in connection with Harvard Uni- 

 versity, are well known. In Canada, the prin- 

 cipal botanical garden is at McGill University, 

 Montreal, still in the course of development. 



Of the numerous ones in France, the Jardin 

 des Plantes is the most noteworthy. It is one 

 of the oldest and largest in the world, growing 

 over 15,000 species of plants. The Royal Gar- 

 dens at Kew, near London, are world-famed, 

 as are also those at Edinburgh, Oxford and 

 Dublin. Other famous European gardens are 

 located at Bologna, Strassburg, Munich and 

 Leipzig. (See illustration of typical building in 

 the article CONSERVATORY.) 



OTANY, the science which deals 

 with plants the description of them, their rela- 

 tionships, their habits, their distribution and 

 their uses. Directly or indirectly man and all 

 the lower animals are dependent upon the plant 

 world for food, for shelter, for clothing (see 

 PLANT), and since plants can be made to yield 

 their best treasures only by means of some such 

 systematic study as botany affords, the value 

 of the science is extremely great, not only to 

 the scholar, but to everybody. 



"Where's the second boy?" asked Mr. Squeers. 



"Please, sir, he's weeding the garden," replied 

 a small voice. 



"To be sure," said Squeers, by no means dis- 

 concerted. "So, he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, 

 bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney ; noun substantive, 

 a knowledge of plants. When he has learned 

 that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he 

 goes and knows 'em. That's our system, 

 Nickleby." 



So spoke the schoolmaster in Dickens' 

 Nicholas Nickleby, defining the word botany 

 better than he spelled it. Though his working 

 out of the method was absurd in the extreme, 

 he described it correctly enough, for the only 

 way of mastering the science of plants is simply 

 to "go and know 'em" by actual experience. 

 It is rather the fashion of many who have never 

 made any systematic study of botany to affect 

 to despise it to declare "I love plants, but I 

 hate botany"; but this is not the attitude of a 

 true plant lover. He will want to know as 

 much as possible about the plants which he 

 loves; and while there are occasional botanists 

 who, as Emerson says, 



Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, 

 And all their botany is Latin names, 



most of them have intelligent delight in the 

 objects of their study. 



