AN OVERDOSE OF PROSPERITY 25 



The outside is of brick pointed with white stone ; the 

 ogival arches of the windows have the tracery of a late 

 period. The notices to students are posted up in Latin 

 and Dutch ; on this day was one concerning a lecture 

 on Herbert Spencer. From hence one goes on to the 

 zoological laboratory and various gardens and university 

 buildings, and round by sundry canals to the Botanical 

 Garden. 



Linnaeus always lived in a garden : he could not help 

 it it gathered round him. If there were no actual 

 garden, he soon made a paradise spring up about him : 

 before all things he was a gardener. ' Better a cowslip 

 with root than a prize carnation without it ' was always 

 his feeling, and now he had the arrangement of the 

 Botanical Garden at Leyden upon his hands which 

 remains a beautiful garden still, and teeming with re- 

 miniscences of Linnaaus. 1 



Here one first enters an umbrella-roofed fernery 

 with tall tree ferns in the centre, ivy and Tradescantia 

 hanging down the grottoed sides. Here are several 

 hot and cool houses, including an orchid collection 

 and a water-lily house. The great hawthorns on a 

 mound, before the domed building of the university 

 opposite, were seedlings in Linnaeus's time. It is 

 pleasing to look across the trails of climbing plants 

 festooned between these trees to where the Rhine 

 winds in front, a curving avenue of horse-chestnuts. 



A Grijmnodadus canadensis, all ivy-grown and 

 1 Not of course comparable with our collections. 



