2 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 
They were usually so situated that the Emperor could leave 
one ‘* Pfalz’’ in the morning and pass the night in the next. 
Charlemagne in his ‘‘ Capitulare’? commands: ‘It is our 
wish that the gardens contain all herbs, i. e., lilies and roses, 
etc.’? He names many .other flowers and vegetables, but he 
also demands several plants which cannot thrive in Germany, 
and can only be raised in southern Europe. How did this 
come about? It is simply because the person (probably a 
friar) to whom Charlemagne had delegated the compilation 
of the list of plants, had taken the names from the ancient 
authors Theophrast and Dioscorides, for it is a remarkable 
fact that for nearly a thousand years the works of these two 
Greek authors remained the authorities concerning the entire 
knowledge of plants. Even six hundred years after Charle- 
magne’s reign all botanists in middle Europe assumed that 
the plants which Theophrast and Dioscorides* had mentioned 
were also indigenous to central and northern Europe. They 
had no conception of the geographical distribution of plants. 
It was the German botanist Fuchs, in whose honor the 
Fuchsias are named, who first showed that the plants in 
Germany are not always the same as in Greece or Italy. 
For the New World we have especially the letters of the 
first conquerors and some later publications concerning the 
natural history of Peru, and America in general. Examples 
are furnished in the works of Acosta, Garcilasso de la Vega 
and others which I have studied in the original Spanish text. 
For North America there are also the reports of the first 
discoverers and of later travelers, and in our times the in- 
teresting studies of the languages of the Indians.t 
But all the literary or pictorial sources are not as important, 
not as reliable as the seeds and other vegetable relics which 
are found in the sepulchres of the Ancients or in their temples 
or in the excavated cities of Pompeii, etc. 
* Asa Gray and Hammond Trumbull, Review of Alph. de Candolle’s 
“ Origine des plantes cultivées,’’ with annotations upon certain American 
species. Amer. Journ. Sci., vol XXV, 1883. 
+ John W. Harshberger, The Uses of Plants among the Ancient Peru- 
vians. Bull. Mus. Sci. and Arts, Univ. Pa., vol. I, no. 3, 1898. 
