AMONG SCHOOL GARDENS 



plots" was comparable to that of children's delight 

 over some odd flower or leaf and their satisfaction 

 at being told its purpose for use or ornament. It is 

 a fact that the celebrated Jardin des Plantes, founded 

 in Paris in 1626, was established for no better purpose 

 than the expressed intention of furnishing new motifs, 

 new floral designs for the embroideries upon the coats 

 and gowns to be worn at the sumptuous court of the 

 Medici. For this purpose, the Jesuit Fathers in far 

 away Canada and the Mississippi valley, were bidden 

 to make a careful report of the flowers they met, and, 

 when possible, to send specimens to France. 



About the beginning of the seventeenth century, 

 the German universities started their botanical gar- 

 dens and began the earnest search for a few under- 

 lying principles that should bind together all the 

 seemingly unrelated forms in the vegetable kingdom. 

 In 1735 Linnaeus, the father of modern botany and 

 of the Linnean "artificial system" of classifying plants, 

 a system in use for many years,* in his "Systema 

 Naturae" framed the first rough chart and forged the 

 key to the mysteries of flower and fruit and growing 

 things. A little later, in 1789, De Jussien in his 

 ''Genera of Plants According to Natural Orders" 

 founded the botanical system in use today. 



Broadly speaking, agricultural knowledge was differ- 

 entiated by the university into botany or medicine, 

 both of which were taught within its walls, and into 

 practical farming, carried on by the monks and peasants. 



* Loudon's Encyclopedia of Plants, published by Longmans, 

 Green & Co., London, 1880, a volume of over a thousand pages and 

 several thousand cuts, has its first section arranged after the Linnean 

 system. 



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