1865.] The Trees and Shrubs of the Ancients. 553 



concealed. With much difficulty he prevailed upon them to spare his 

 bantling, and succeeded in carrying it in triumph to Paris, where it 

 flourished in the Jardin des Plantes, and grew until it reached 100 

 years of age, and 80 feet in height. In 1837 it was cut down to make 

 room for a railway, and now the hissing steam engine passes over the 

 place where it stood. 



We are astonished at this statement, and in commenting on it we 

 give the following remarks of Dr. Asa Gray : — 



" Of course, it is almost unnecessary to say that Bernard Jussieu 

 never visited the Holy Land, and was not likely, if he had, to come 

 home bare-headed, using his hat the while for a pot ; that the fact, or 

 at least the accepted tradition, is merely this, that he brought the 

 seedling Cedar from England to Paris in his hat. The story of the 

 voyage from the Levant to Marseilles appears to be an adaptation of 

 one about the three Coffee -plants, which Antoine de Jussieu, in the 

 year 1720, sent from the Jardin des Plantes to the vessel commanded 

 by Captain Declieux, who was charged by the French Government 

 with the duty of transporting them to Martinique. The voyage being 

 unusually long, the water is said to have failed, two of the precious 

 plants died, and the remaining one is said to have been kept alive by 

 the devotion of the Captain, who bestowed upon it his own scanty 

 ration of water, and so preserved the ancestor of all the Coffee-planta- 

 tions of the Antilles. For this devotion, we presume, his name is 

 commemorated in the genus Declieuxia, of the Coffee family. What 

 are the other ingredients of this pot-pourri we are unable to conjecture. 

 But the naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes may be somewhat asto- 

 nished to learn that a railway traverses their peaceful grounds, and 

 that a hissing steam engine runs over the steep little hill upon which 

 flourished, and as we fondly imagine still flourishes, Bernard de Jus- 

 sieu's Cedar of Lebanon." 



The third and fourth lectures are devoted to various shrubby plants 

 of Greece and Italy. In speaking of the Vine, Daubeny says : — " Some 

 of the varieties of Vine described by ancient writers seem to exist at 

 the present day — a fact worthy of notice with reference to the much- 

 disputed question as to the dying-out of species. Thus Pliny notices 

 a Greek Vine in a manner which would lead us to believe it meant for 

 the Corinth or Currant of the Greek Islands. Columella also men- 

 tions that this variety of Vine was cultivated in several parts of Italy 

 as well as of Greece ; and Mr. Hogg states that it grows abundantly 

 in the Island of Lipari, where it is called Passolina. 



The engraving in the Vienna edition of Dioscorides will probably 

 be considered as bearing more resemblance to the currant vine than 

 to the ordinary one ; and Dioscorides makes mention of two varieties, 

 one probably the common Vitis vinifera in its wild state, the other the 

 Vitis labrusca, with a woolly leaf, the parent, as it would seem, of the 

 currant or Corinthian grape. I may add that, according to Count 

 Odart, one variety of vine, now called Pinceau, was known so long 

 ago as 1394. Another, planted in Andalusia by the Moors, still 

 retains its characters ; and that the Cornichon of Paris was described 

 six centuries ago by an Arabian writer under the name of Lady's 



