PARKS AND GARDENS. 99 



can receive his friends, listen to their verses, and recite to 

 them his own/' ( 139 ) See-ma-kuang wrote in the year 1086, 

 when, in Germany, poetry, in the hands of a rude clergy, 

 did not even speak the language of the country. At that 

 period, and, perhaps, five centuries earlier, the inhabitants 

 of China, Transgangetic India, and Japan, were already 

 acquainted with a great variety of forms of plants. The 

 intimate connection maintained between the Buddhistic 

 monasteries was not without influence in this respect. 

 Temples, cloisters, and burying-places were surrounded with 

 gardens, adorned with exotic trees, and with a carpet of 

 flowers of many forms and colours. The plants of India 

 were early conveyed to China, Corea, and Nipbn. Siebold, 

 whose writings afford a comprehensive view of all that 

 relates to Japan, was the first to call attention to the cause 

 of the intermixture of the floras of widely-separated Bud- 

 dhistic countries. ( 14 ) 



The rich and increasing variety of characteristic vegetable 

 forms which, in the present age, are offered both to scientific 

 observation and to landscape painting, cannot but afford a 

 lively incentive to trace out the sources which have prepared 

 for us this more extended knowledge and this increased 

 enjoyment. The enumeration of these sources is reserved 

 for the succeeding section of my work, *. e. the history of 

 the contemplation of the universe. In the section which I 

 am now closing, I have sought to depict those incentives, 

 due to the influence exerted on the intellectual activity 

 and the feelings of men by the reflected image of the external 

 world, which, in the progress of modern civilisation, have 

 tended so materially to encourage and vivify the study of 

 nature. Notwithstanding a certain degree of arbitrary free- 



