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 
of 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. Linnzus 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 
Ayothecaries’ 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 Rubiacez, a species of which is 
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