450 COSMOS. 



These studies he himself partly executed as paintings, and 

 partly etched with much spirit. To this period belong the 



*n flower throughout the winter by maintaining a pleasant degree of heat. 

 The account of this banquet, exaggerated into something marvellous, 

 occurs in the Chronica Joannis de Beka, written in the middle of the 

 fourteenth century (Beka et Heda de Episcopis Ultrajectinis, recogn. 

 ab. Arn. Buchelio, 1643, p. 79; Jourdain, Recherches critiques sur I' Age 

 des Traductions d'Aristote, 1819, p. 331; Buhle, Gesch. der Philoso- 

 phie, th. v. s. 296). Although the ancients, as we find from the exca- 

 vations at Pompeii, made use of panes of glass in buildings, yet nothing 

 has been found to indicate the use of glass or hot houses in ancient hor- 

 ticulture. The mode of conducting heat by the caldaria into baths might 

 have led to the construction of such forcing or hothouses, but the 

 shortness of the Greek and Italian winters must have caused the want 

 of artificial heat to be less felt in horticulture. The Adonis gardens 

 (KrJTroi Acuvidog), so indicative of the meaning of the festival of Adonis, 

 consisted, according to Bb'ckh, of plants in small pots, which were, no 

 doubt, intended to represent the garden where Aphrodite met Adonis, 

 who was the symbol of the quickly fading bloom of youth, of luxuriant 

 growth, and of rapid decay. The festivals of Adonis were, therefore, 

 seasons of solemn lamentations for women, and belonged to the 

 festivals in which the ancients lamented the decay of nature. As I 

 have spoken in the text of hothouse plants, in contrast with those 

 which grow naturally, I would add that the ancients frequently used 

 the term " Adonis gardens" proverbially, 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 und 

 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 convent at Cologne reminds us of the Green- 

 land 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 geographical localities indicated, must be con- 

 sidered as very problematical. (Compare Zurla, Viaggiatori Veneziani, 

 t. ii. pp. 63-69; and Humboldt, Examen critique de I' Hist, de la Geo- 

 graphie, t. ii. p. 127.) The introduction in our botanic gardens of 

 regular hothouses seems to be of more recent date than is generally 

 supposed. Ripe pineapples were first obtained at the end of the seven- 

 teenth century (Beckmann's History of Inventions, Bohn's Standard 

 Library, 1846, vol. i. pp. 103-106); and Linnaeus even asserts, in the 

 Musa Cliffortiana florens Hartecampi, that the first banana which 

 flower 3d in Europe was in 1731, at Vienna, in the garden of Prince 

 Eugene. 



