136 L[ntroducers of Exotic Flowers, ete. 
most anxious nursing, and were the gifts of individuals. 
Monuments are reared, and medals struck, to commemorate 
events and names, which are less deserving our regard than 
those who have transplanted into the colder gardens of the 
North the rich fruits, the beautiful flowers, and the succu- 
lent pulse and roots of more favoured spots; and carrying 
into their own country, as it were, another Nature, they 
have, as old Gerald well expresses it, “laboured with the 
soil to make it fit for the plants, and with the plants to 
make them delight in the soil.” 
There is no part of the characters of Peiresc and Evelyn, 
accomplished as‘they are in so many, which seems more 
delightful to me, than their enthusiasm for the garden, the 
orchard, and the forest. 
Pieresc, whose literary occupations admitted of no inter- 
ruption, and whose universal correspondence throughout 
the habitable globe was more than sufficient to absorb his 
studious life, yet was the first man, as Gassendus relates in’ 
his interesting manner, whose incessant inquiries procured 
the great variety of jessamines ; those from China, whose 
leaves, always green, bear a clay-coloured flower, and a 
delicate perfume ; the American with a crimson-coloured, 
and the Persian with a violet-coloured flower; and the 
Arabian, whose tendrils he delighted to train over “the 
banqueting-house in his garden ;’” and of fruits, the orange- 
trees with a red and parti-coloured flower; the medlar; 
the rough cherry without stone; the rare and luxurious 
vines of Smyrna and Damascus; and the fig-tree called 
Adam/’s, whose fruit, by its size, was supposed to be that 
with which the spies returned from the land of Canaan. 
Gassendus describes his transports when Peiresc beheld the 
Indian ginger growing green in his garden, and his delight 
in grafting the myrtle on the musk vine, that the experi- 
ment might show us the myrtle wine of the ancients. But 
transplanters, like other inventors, are sometimes baffled in 
their delightful enterprises; and we are told of Pieresc’s 
deep regret when he found that the Indian cocoa-nut would 
only bud, and then perish in the cold air of France, while 
the leaves of the Egyptian papyrus refused to yield him 
their vegetable paper. But it was his garden which pro- 
pagated the exotic fruits and flowers, which he transplanted 
into the French king’s, and into Cardinal Barberini’s, and 
the curious in Europe; and these occasioned a work on 
the manuring of flowers by Ferrarius, a botanical Jesuit, 
who there described these novelties to Europe. 
