ACCLIMATIZATION. 
65 
poplars, tulip-trees, willows, and liquidambar, magnolias, rhododendrons, 
azaleas, and a vast army of trees, vegetables, and flowers, to—say nothing of 
animals, birds and reptiles (specially the tortoise) ; Central Africa, the cacao; 
South America, the tea-plant and cinchona, fuchsia, calceolaria, and passion¬ 
flower. 
Such is a general outline of the Societe du Jardin d’Acclimatation. 
Thoughtful men of all nations have been keen observers of nature, and in 
the charmed circle of other thoughtful men they have received the full 
homage of respect: yet too often the result of their labours has been a new 
ponderous folio, or a learned abstract, destined to be decently interred in the 
annals of some privileged society. Books do not teach everybody—there is a 
class of mind (in itself both highly cultivated and intelligent) to which 
printed sentences are literally a dead letter. Many a man of great energy, 
passionately fond of enterprise, daring and successful in commercial specula¬ 
tion, is in himself a walking encyclopaedia of general knowledge, and is yet 
incapable of clothing a single thought in appropriate written language, and 
hates the printer’s devil as orthodox Christians do the father of all evil. Shall 
we call him uneducated, and ignore his real practical learning ? Let us be 
more sensible, and at the same time more just —his literature is action. Now 
a garden, such as the one described, appeals directly to sympathies like these. 
Here is a book in Nature-printing, the type of which is never worn, and 
whose truths present the strange anomaly that they are both ever-changing 
and everlasting,—a book wherein the most contemplative philosopher and the 
busiest mortal may delight to read ; and it is certainly worth while offering a 
fair field of study to meet the craving eagerness of many an adventurous 
spirit, who, though he may scarcely distinguish between an Elzevir and the 
printing of this Journal, feels himself aggrieved because his merit is sometimes 
unfavourably contrasted with that of the man who can merely round a period 
or construct a phrase. 
Should it, moreover, be the fortune (good or ill) of any reader of these 
lines to be engaged on foreign service, he will assuredly thank the writer for 
having introduced the subject of Acclimatization to his notice. I had a near 
and dear relative, of most companionable habits, stationed in the Havannah. 
Often have I listened to his sad recital of the blank routine monotony of that 
least enviable life. No wonder that in all that colony of disheartened 
Englishmen there was but one thought,—to make money and retire. How 
would each homesick resident have welcomed the genial inspiration of the 
Saint-Hilaires, and have expanded under the grateful influence of a study 
which brought them once more within the pale of European sympathies! 
“Thoughts perish,” says the eternal record; well is it, therefore, for the 
natural philosopher of the present day that his deepest theories may be 
translated into living and palpable realities ; and that while men stumble over 
books and sentences, he may not only realize his speculations, but present 
them in a language intelligible to humanity in common. 
In 1860, M. E. Eoehn thought that the alpaca* was destined to be of essential 
service; he sent over and acclimatized the animal, and it is now writing its 
own history (practical and scientific) in the Garden at Paris, in the industrial 
produce of Australia, in the fabrics of the North of England, in the covering 
of my umbrella, and in my last tailor’s bill. May I commend this great 
subject specially to Pharmaceutists ? may I offer them, even though but as a 
* This paper is of course written from a French point of view. I am not ignorant, of 
th* English claim to the introduction of the alpaca, nor of the admirable acclimatization 
experiments of Messrs. Ledger, Wilson, and others. Let us hope that some competent 
authority will give an account of recent Australian success. 
