traokiiiff a hare in the snow : the detective on the traces of a 

 murderer ; tlie school-girl puzzling out a riddle ; Dr. Johnson 

 on a philological hunt ; or the botanist making out the names 

 of his plants, are all actuated by the same feehng. Tliis 

 instinct would find ample scope in such a volume. The 

 author would have to trace the relations between intercourse 

 with different countries and the improvements in gardening. He 

 would have to apportion the merit due for such improvements to 

 the various influences which produced them, of which com- 

 mercial enterprise and the Ecclesiastical polity in monkish 

 times formed no mean part. He would have to show by what 

 decrees and through what influences the horticultural taste 

 passed from the grotesquely chpped yew figures and hedges, 

 which found favour with our ancestors, to the more natural 

 and simpler likings of our own day. He would have to explain 

 the marvellous progress from the scanty garden-flora of the times, 

 when the principal materials out of which to form a pleasure- 

 garden of "tender herbs and pleasant flowere" consisted of 

 "marjoram, saveiie, herbe FlueUine, buglosse, the blessed thistle," 

 (the Carduus benedictus, or plain holy thistle of Beatrice), 

 "Angelica, baume, aums, dizany, sorTel, strawberries, pseony, 

 lavender, gentle, lettuce, artichoke," and so on tln-ough about a 

 score more now-forgotten names, and our present stores, when 

 almost all that is graceful in form or brdhant in colour in the 

 vegetable world have been ravished from their native chmes 

 and transported to our own shores. He would have to show 

 how the skill, or rather the ignorance, which scarcely knew 

 more than how to "graff" a "leather coat," has given place 

 to the science of modem days, before which even form and 



