THE HISTORY OF THE BOTANICAL MAGAZINE xi 
whose collections of dried specimens of plants are preserved 
in the British Museum; an institution founded upon the 
collection of Sloane, who was also largely instrumental in 
establishing the Chelsea Botanic Garden. Plukenet was 
superintendent of the garden at Hampton Court during the 
latter part of his life, but all these writers were more active 
with dried specimens than living plants. 
JoHN Marryn. 
My object being to give an idea of the state of flower 
gardening immediately before the Botanical Magazine came 
into existence, I must not dwell so long on this theme as [ 
am tempted to. Therefore I make a leap of a century, and 
take a look at John Martyn’s sumptuous Historia Plantaruin 
Rariorum, dated 1728. As was the custom of the period 
this book is a folio, and a large folio, and it was issued in 
parts, from 1728 to 1732, when it was discontinued on 
account of its costliness, after the publication of fifty plates. 
It was designed to contain coloured figures of the natural 
size of such curious plants as had not been figured before, 
together with their descriptions and culture. The plates 
are mezzotinto, and were painted by Van Huysum, and 
engraved by Kirkall; most of the plants represented were 
cultivated in the Chelsea Botanic Gardens, and many of them 
were introduced by W. Houston, a surgeon in the Navy, 
from the West Indies and Mexico. They include several 
species of Passiflora and Cassia, and the genera Turnera, 
Gronovia, Martynia, Milleria, &c. Houston himself, who 
met with an untimely death in the West Indies, had 
engraved the flowers and fruits of several, and given them 
generic names (this was shortly before Linnzus proposed his 
famous binominal nomenclature), and Sir Joseph Banks, 
subsequently acquiring these engravings from Philip Miller, 
published them under the title of Reliquiz Houstoniane, 
with Houston's names and the Linnean names. I ma 
mention, as it has often been overlooked, that Martyn gives 
the Linnean names of the plants in the Historia, on an un- 
paged leaf immediately after the preface. Three or four of 
them were, however, first named by Philip Miller. Besides 
the plants from the American region there are three or four 
Pelargoniums, including P. inquinans, the parent of the 
“ scarlets”; a Mesembryanthemum, and an aloe from South 
Africa. Noteworthy too, among the figures is that of Bletia 
verecunda (Helleborine americana), which I believe was the 
first tropical Orchid cultivated in England, and the manner 
