58 THE APOTHECARIES' GARDEN 



Nothing daunted, the Apothecaries next 

 agreed to contribute twenty pounds a year 

 towards a plant collector who would explore 

 an American colony, which the warm-hearted 

 General Oglethorpe had founded for poor 

 debtors, and called, after George II, who had 

 given him a charter, " Georgia " ; and Philip 

 Miller sent cotton seed to the colony (in 1732), 

 "the parent stock of upland cotton" 1 the 

 ordinary cotton of the United States. So 

 from this little packet of seed, sent as a present 

 from the Chelsea Garden to the young colony 

 in which Sir Hans Sloane and the Apothecaries 

 were interested, three-fourths of the world's 

 cotton is descended ! 



It was even decided that the Garden must 

 have a statue of Sir Hans Sloane, and that 

 Michael Rysbrack, the sculptor who had 

 finished a monument to Sir Isaac Newton for 

 Westminster Abbey, must undertake it (" Rice- 

 bank" the clerk at Apothecaries' Hall called 

 him). 



Two hundred and eighty pounds were voted 

 for it, and it was finished in 1737. A worthy 

 statue it was and still is, owing to the fact 

 that it was for some time kept under shelter in 

 the greenhouse, 2 and that when it was removed 

 to the Garden it was covered with a sail cloth 3 

 in bad weather ; but the acid-laden rain of 

 London has already destroyed more than its 

 original smooth surface, and Sloane 's full 



1 A. W. Hill, Annals of Missouri Botanical Garden, p. 222. 



2 Field states that the statue was originally " in front of the 

 greenhouse." Kalm saw it " in one room of the Orange House." 

 It was removed to the middle of the Garden in 1748. 



8 Barrett, p. 139. 



