GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



been somewhat startling. It was to the effect that the Embank- 

 ment with which we are now so familiar, was to be constructed on 

 the southern bank of the Thames, involving unavoidable encroach- 

 ments on their Physic Garden and consequent loss of immediate 

 access to the river, and the right to a portion of the foreshore, since 

 a road was to intervene between the river and the garden. As 

 compensation, however, the Board of Works endowed the Society 

 with certain rights, and paid a large sum of money for the erection 

 of a handsome wall, railing, and gateway, on the river side. 



Among the members of the Apothecaries' Society in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries, were many distinguished by their 

 scientific attainments, and we are assured that " all of them were 

 good citizens and honorable men," and, according to the standard 

 f those earlier days, " efficient practitioners of the healing art.'* 

 The Curators, Demonstrators of Plants, and Professors of Botany 

 at the Physic Garden were, with rare exceptions, men of culture, 

 and the Society encouraged, and even enforced, the study of Latin 

 among its pupils. Latin had been for centuries, and particularly 

 after the revival of learning, the ordinary means of communica- 

 tion between educated men ; when it ceased to be thus generally 

 used, several modern tongues became necessary, where before, one 

 dead one had sufficed. Linnaeus himself, " whose acquirements 

 in the whole range of science were no less than gigantic," although 

 a great traveller, and one who had resided three years in Holland, 

 understood only Latin and Swedish, and because few people were 

 familiar with his native language, his letters to foreigners, and 

 most of his books, were in Latin. It is therefore not surprising 

 that all the quotations met with in the history of the garden, 

 are in the Latin tongue, and that the early members of the 

 Apothecaries' Society were for the most part well acquainted 

 with it. 



So many of those holding office at the garden were distinguished 

 in botany and the allied sciences, that it is almost invidious to 

 particularize, but James Sherard, a member of the governing 

 committee of the garden, deserves mention. He withdrew from 

 the Society of Apothecaries in 1732, when, having received a 

 diploma of medicine, he began to practise as a physician, but his 

 name is perpetuated in a genus of plants known as " Sherardea" 

 of the natural order of the Rubiaceae, a species of which i& 



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