OF PHYSIC GARDENS 21 



there " the " eggs " being in reality the fungoid 

 growths. The amendment stands as an amusing 

 case of " even master don't know much." 



We are tempted to linger in the old physic gar- 

 den, with its gateway sentinelled by two ancient 

 yews which once were clipped into semblance of 

 guardian giants, its locust trees and its planes, its 

 alien plants cultivated at first in the garden borders, 

 but which afterwards betook themselves of their 

 own accord to more congenial crevices of the walls, 

 where some of them, naturalised like the Oxford 

 ragwort, are still to be found. We can even now 

 sympathise heartily with Dillenius in his dilemma 

 and lament in a letter to Linnasus that " the situ- 

 ation of Oxford is low and watery, the neigh- 

 bouring meadows being overflowed close to the 

 garden, and heavy morning fogs will scarcely 

 allow the plants of hot climates to attain perfec- 

 tion." We may wonder, too, why these old 

 worthies of a former day forgot to mention the 

 fritillaries, so familiar for generations past in the 

 Oxford meadows, so that no record was made of 

 them for more than a hundred years after the 

 foundation of the garden, though they surely must 

 have been there. We can only be thankful that, 

 among the sundry and manifold changes and 

 chances of this mortal life, the first English physic 

 garden has been permitted to remain with all its 

 old-world associations so far unobliterated, except 

 indeed that it has been shorn of its time-honoured 

 title. 



The physic garden at Chelsea, which was of 

 later establishment, and presented by Sir Hans 



