64 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN 



It is in two small volumes of note-books, with all the 

 illustrations at the end. The text is in Latin ; but this is 

 of no consequence, as Jacquin's books are aU botanical, 

 not horticultural, and their botany is obsolete. This 

 remarkable man, Nicholas Joseph Jacquin, whose in- 

 dustry must have been untiring, was bom at Leyden in 

 1727, and educated there at the University for the medical 

 profession. This meant in those days the highest 

 botanical education which could be obtained. He went to 

 Vienna, at the suggestion of a friend, to practise medicine, 

 but when there his great botanical knowledge brought 

 him to the notice of Francis I. This emperor seems to 

 have been a great patron of botany and gardening, the 

 fashionable combination of the day. He sent Jacquin to 

 the West Indies for six years to collect plants for the 

 Schonbrunn Gardens, paying his expenses. Jacquin did 

 not die till 1817, leaving an unfinished work, 'Eclogae 

 Plantarum Eariorum,' the only one of Jacquin's books 

 that has a German as well as a Latin text. The second 

 volume was not pubUshed till 1844, by Edouardus Penzl, 

 long after Jacquin's death. The colour and painting are 

 very inferior to Jacquin's work. Towards the end of the 

 last century, in the midst of wars and revolutions, the 

 crumbling of old methods of government and the change 

 of social customs, an extraordinary band of able men all 

 over Europe were quietly working in concert and with 

 constant communication. Their object was to increase 

 the knowledge of the science of botany by reproducing, 

 with the greatest botanical exactness of detaU, the plants 

 imported from aU parts of the world as they flowered in 

 Europe for the first time in the various greenhouses and 

 stoves. It is remarkable that the books of this period, 

 even of different countries, very rarely illustrate the same 

 plants. The botanical curiosity, the feehng of something 

 new, rare, and not fully understood, which is such an 



