BOTANIC GARDENS. 



17 



and described, aiid the woodcuts in this quaint old herbal are of 

 value even at this time. It is to be borne in mind, however, that 

 Fuchs had f ormed no idea of the natural relationships of plants. 

 The species given in the herbal are arranged in alphabetical 

 order. It seems almost inconceivable at the present day, yet the 

 descriptions of plants made by botanists in ihe period preceding 

 Braunfels (1530) and Fuchs were not taken from nature, but were 

 borrowed from still earlier writers, and supplemented by addi- 

 tions drawn purely from fancy and colored by the superstition 

 of the time. 



The establishment of the garden in 1662 was purely for the 

 purpose of conserving medicinal plants, and only such species 

 were cultivated as could be 

 grown in the open air. The art 

 of growing plants in artificially 

 heated glass houses was not un- 

 derstood at that time. The gar- 

 den occupied a plot of ground 

 lying on the banks of the Neckar 

 in what is now the heart of the 

 city of Tubingen, where it re- 

 mained until 1805, when it was 

 removed to its present position. 



The lectures in botany in the 

 university took on a new dignity 

 when a separate chair was de- 

 voted to the subject by the ap- 

 pointment of Rudolph Jacob 

 Camerarius as extraordinary 

 professor and director of the bo- 

 tanic garden in 1688. He was 

 afterward promoted and re- 

 mained at the university until 

 his death, in 1728. Camerarius 

 made a most notable addition to 

 botanical science by the actual 



experimental demonstration of the principal facts in the pollina- 

 tion of plants (1691 to 1694). Sachs says in his history of botany : 

 " Camerarius had observed that a female mulberry tree once bore 

 fruit, though no male tree (amentaceis floribus) was in the neigh- 

 borhood, but that the berries contained only abortive and empty 

 seeds, which he compared to the addled eggs of a bird. His at- 

 tention was aroused, and he made his first experiment on another 

 dioecious plant (Mercurialis annua). He took, in the end of May, 

 two female specimens of the wild plant (they were usually called 

 male, but he knew them to be female) and set them in pots apart 



Simon" ScHWEUDEisrER, Professor of Botany 

 and Director of the Botanic Garden, 

 1878. After a photograph by T. Bar- 

 zuck, Berlin. 



