56 THE APOTHECARIES' GARDEN 



A description of James Sherard's garden at 

 Eltham, with its rare plants, in two folio 

 volumes with 300 plates, was written by 

 Dillenius 1 of Oxford in 1732. 



Sir Hans Sloane at once brought in Philip 

 Miller as gardener an able man, and well 

 trained in practical gardening by his father, a 

 nurseryman. Two years at the garden enabled 

 Miller to publish The Gardener's Dictionary 

 a great book, destined to go through many 

 editions, to be translated into other languages, 

 and to give its author the right to be styled, 

 even by foreign botanists, the chief of gardeners 

 Hortulanorum princeps. Linnaeus called the 

 book a " dictionary, not only of horticulture, 

 but of botany." Miller was the first to notice 

 the part played by insects in fertilizing flowers, 

 and became an F.R.S. 



The Committee also appointed Isaac Rand 

 (an Apothecary, F.R.S., and a zealous botanist) 

 Director of the Garden and Demonstrator of 

 Plants. He must have found his high office 

 eclipsed by the work of the energetic gardener, 

 whose papers were continually appearing before 

 the scientific world. Miller, too, had not 

 only published his Gardener's Dictionary, but, 

 without medical training, a catalogue of the 

 medicinal plants in the Garden. Isaac Rand 

 was angry at this encroachment on his province, 

 and published, and presented to the Apothe- 

 caries, a fuller catalogue in Latin. 



1 Dillenius was the first Professor of Botany at Oxford. " He 

 was in the habit of scattering seeds in the neighbourhood of the 

 city, some of whose descendants caused surprise to later genera- 

 tions of botanical students." Vernon's History of the Oxford 

 Museum. 



