248 Botanic Garden of Madrid. 



the garden have, from the time of its foundation, been fre- 

 quently consulted by the government in every branch relating 

 to the science of botany, and these consultations have occupied 

 much of their precious time. 



The garden of Madrid was in open correspondence with the 

 principal gardens of Europe and America, excepting Eng- 

 land, where their only correspondent was Aylmer Bourke 

 Lambert, Esq., to whom they were in the habit of sending an- 

 nually some thousands of seeds, and who, in his turn, sent 

 considerable numbers of those which were asked of him. The 

 garden made great acquisitions by the annual collections sent 

 from the island of Cuba by their corresponding member Don 

 Mariano Espinosa, to whom the government, in consequence, 

 assigned 400/. sterling a year, from 1805 ; by those sent from 

 Mexico by Don Vicente Cervantes; and by those sent by the 

 different members and amateurs throughout the Peninsula. 

 It is in consequence of this that the greatest part of the plants 

 of Cuba, Mexico, and South America, reared in the botanical 

 gardens of Europe for the last forty years, were communicated 

 to them through the botanical garden of Madrid ; such are, 

 among many others, the cobea, stevias, many and very beautiful 

 salviae, mimosae, solanaceae, malvacese, compositiflorae, grami- 

 nese, onagrarise, and leguminosse. 



The schools of this establishment have been always very well 

 attended, both by students and hearers; the establishment 

 itself enjoyed great reputation in the nation; its professors 

 having diffused much valuable information, not only in the 

 way above hinted, but by the numerous and estimable writings 

 which, during the seventy-one years it existed, have been pub- 

 lished, and which amount to more than eighty volumes, in- 

 cluding translations. It is to this establishment that the 

 information, not only in botanical matters, but in those of 

 agriculture, and the taste introduced into Spain for the other 

 branches of natural sciences, is owing. 



The garden of Madrid furnishes the public gratis with all 

 the medicinal plants which it possesses, and with great quanti- 

 ties of seeds of umbrageous trees, ornamental plants, as well as 

 those of pasturage, and other useful ones, both in husbandry and 

 pharmacy ; so that three men are continually employed in 

 preparing boxes of seeds to send as presents to private indivi- 

 duals, and to foreign gardens in the way of exchange. 



Such is, briefly, the state in which the botanical garden of 

 Madrid was in 1823, when the liberty of Spain was overturned, 

 and with it the hope of seeing established the botanical 

 gardens decreed by the Cortes in 1821, in their regulations for 

 public instruction, in which a garden was ordered to be 



