KEW GARDENS. 
167 
Museums, in which the economic uses of the different kinds 
of plants are illustrated. 
During the last ten years these three main essential 
departments have been supplemented through private liberality 
with an art gallery and physiological laboratory. I will, in 
the first place, say a few words about the details of each of 
these three departments. 
The Garden 
covers an area of 325 acres, and the grounds of the Queen’s 
Cottage, to which the public are not admitted, are 26 acres 
more. Whilst a portion of the property was in the hands 
of Sir Henry (afterwards Lord) Capel, in the reign of 
Charles the Second, the Garden was alreadv one of the best 
in the country. Kew House and the surrounding grounds 
were rented on a long lease by Frederic, Prince of Wales, in 
1730, and they were purchased by his son, George the Third, 
a short time after he came to the throne in 1760. Prince 
Frederic died in 1751, and his widow, the Princess Augusta, who 
was a daughter of the Duke of Saxe Gotha, still continued to 
reside at Kew, and may be looked upon as the real originator 
of the botanic garden. Her principal adviser, the Earl of 
Bute, who was Prime Minister for a year in the early part of 
the reign of George the Third, was an enthusiastic botanist; 
he spent ten thousand pounds in printing an elaborate botanic 
work in nine volumes, of which only twelve copies were 
struck off. 
During this middle generation of the eighteenth century 
the writings of Linnaeus gave an enormous impulse to the 
popularity of botany. The first edition of his ‘‘Species 
Plantarum,” in which the binominal Latin names of plants 
were first given to them, was first issued in 1753. For garden 
plants they were first popularised in England in the eighth 
edition of the “ Gardener’s Dictionary” of Philip Miller, of 
Chelsea, published in 1768. In the same year a catalogue of 
the plants then cultivated in Kew Gardens was published by 
Sir John Hill. It includes fifty ferns, between 500 and 600 
trees and shrubs, and several thousand herbaceous plants. 
For a long time during the reign of George the Third and his 
successors, the Garden was managed by the two Aitons, 
father and son. The elder Aiton was born in 1731, came 
to England in 1754, entered the service of the Princess 
Dowager of Wales at Kew, in 1759, and died in 1793. With 
the aid of Dr. Solander he published, in 1789, a book called 
“ Hortus Kewensis,” containing descriptive characters of all 
the plants, 5,600 in number, then cultivated in the Garden. 
