Tllli: UTILITY OF BOTANICAL KNOWLEDGE. 531 
the experiments were made on plants common to our own coun¬ 
try, we propose to give here. 
Linnaeus conceived the first design of this institution from ob¬ 
servations made in his Dalekarlian journey, in which he found 
that his horses left untouched, among other plants, meadow sweet, 
great wild valerian, lily of the valley, angelica, rose-hay, willow 
herb, marsh cinquefoil, mountain crow-foot, crain-bill, globe crow¬ 
foot, yellow wolfs-bane, and various other shrubs. Soon after 
his return, himself and many of his pupils set to work. Above 
28,000 experiments were made upon the horned cattle, goats, 
sheep, horses, and hogs, many of which were repeated over ten 
and sometimes twenty times, with the sole view of determining 
what kinds of vesretables those several animals would eat or 
reject. It is easy to be imagined that numberless difficulties 
must arise in the prosecution of this affair, and that imperfec¬ 
tion, in many instances, must at last attend their greatest accu¬ 
racy. In the meantime care was taken, as far as circumstances 
would admit, that the experiments were made in a manner as 
unexceptionable as possible; and the result of the experiments, 
upon the whole, must be true, as they have a real foundation in 
those unerring laws of instinct to which the God of nature has 
subjected the whole of the brute creation. The plants were all 
fresh gathered, not bruized in the getting, nor offered to the 
cattle when they were almost famished, nor glutted with variety, 
nor yet in the spring time, when many of them greedily devour 
almost any vegetable they can get at, and, in some places, such 
as are fatal to them, and which at other times they will not touch. 
The plants were, in many instances, offered to several indivi¬ 
duals of the same species. These trials were made only with 
the indigenous plants of Sweden, from which, it appears, that 
the horned cattle would eat of the plants which were offered 
them only 276 species, and that they rejected 218. The goats 
eat of 449 kinds ; and refused but 126. The sheep eat of 387; 
and refused 141. The horses eat of 262 species ; and refused 
212; and of those which were offered to swine they eat of 72, 
and refused 171. 
The science of botany certainly holds its most dignified sta¬ 
tion when subservient to the purposes of medicine ; but we have 
in England too long considered the knowledge of plants as the 
business only of the physician. Its connexion with other useful 
arts in life has been too long neglected. They are not the only 
persons who ought to be acquainted with it. Many others would 
find not only pleasure, but advantage, resulting from a know¬ 
ledge of the plants of their own country. In the instance before 
us, science has opened the way,* and I think it is not too much 
