92 COSMOS. ^ 



as paintings, and partly etched with much spirit. To this 

 period belong the remarkably large oil pictures preserved in 

 Denmark, in a gallery of the beautiful palace of Frederiks- 

 borg, which were painted by Eckhout, who, in 1641, was also 

 on the Brazilian coast with Prince Maurice of Nassau. In 

 these compositions, palms, papaws, bananas, and heliconias 

 are most characteristically delineated, as are also brightly-plu- 

 maged birds, and small quadrupeds, and the form and appear 

 ance of the natives. 



These examples of a delineation of the physiognomy of nat- 

 ural scenery were not followed by many artists of merit before 

 Cook's second voyage of circumnavigation. What Hodges did 

 for the western islands of the Pacific, and my distinguished 

 countryman, Ferdinand Bauer, for New Holland and Van 

 Diemen's Land, has been since done, in more recent times, on 

 a far grander scale, and in a masterly manner, by Moritz 

 Rugendas, Count Clarac, Ferdinand Bellermann, and Edward 

 Hildebrandt ; and for the tropical vegetation of America, and 

 for many other parts of the earth, by Heinrich von Kittlitz, 

 the companion of the Russian Admiral Llitke, on his voyage 

 of circumnavigation.* 



cients lamented the decay of nature. As I have spoken in the text of 

 hot-house plants in contrast with those which grow naturally, I would 

 add that the ancients frequently used the term " Adonis gardens" pro- 

 verbially, to indicate something which had shot up rapidly, without 

 promise of perfect maturity or duration. These plants, which were 

 lettuce, fennel, barley, and wheat, and not variegated flowers, were 

 forced, by extreme care, into rapid growth in summer (and not in the 

 winter), and were often made to grow to maturity in a period of only 

 eight days. Creuzer, in his Symbolik mid Mythologie, 1841, th. ii., s. 

 427, 430, 479, und 481, supposes " that strong natural and artificial heat, 

 in the room in which they were placed, was used to hasten the growth 

 of plants in the Adonis gardens." The garden of the Dominican con- 

 vent at Cologne reminds us of the Greenland or Icelandic convent of 

 St. Thomas, where the garden was kept free from snow by being 

 warmed by natural thermal springs, as is related by the brothers Zeni, 

 in the account of their travels (1388-1404), which, from the geograph- 

 ical localities indicated, must be considered as very problematical. 

 (Compare Zurla, Viaggiatori Veneziaiii, t. ii., p. 63-69 ; and Humboldt, 

 Examen Critique de V Hist, de la G6ograpliie, t. ii., p. 127.) The intro- 

 duction in our botanic gardens of regular hot-houses seems to be of 

 more recent date than is generally supposed. Ripe pine-apples were 

 first obtained at the end of the seventeenth century (Beckmanu's His- 

 tory of Inventions, Bohn's Standard Library, 1846, vol. i., p. 103-106); 

 and Linnaeus even asserts, in the Musa Cliffortiana jiorens Hartecampi, 

 that the first banana which flowered in Europe was in 1731, at Vienna, 

 in the garden of Prince Eugene. 



* These views of tropical vegetation, which designate the ''physiog- 

 nomy of plants," constitute, in the Royal Museum at Berlin (in the de« 



