AmMa£rimarm'}  London  Botanic  Gardens,  225 
mittee  and  found  to  be  in  very  good  order.  The  expenses  of  the 
garden,  however,  were  also  increasing,  and  the  strain  upon  the 
Society's  resources  became  so  great  that  the  Master  and  Wardens 
in  1753,  the  year  of  Sir  Hans  Sloane's  death,  consulted  the  President 
of  the  Royal  Society  on  the  subject,  but  apparently  without  result. 
The  difficulty  was,  nevertheless,  tided  over,  and,  after  1770,  the 
expenditure  continued  to  advance  steadily.  During  Lindley's  tenure 
of  office  as  Professor  and  Director  it  became  more  than  doubled, 
and  ultimately  proved  too  great  a  burden  for  the  Society  to  bear 
In  1853  economies  were  effected  which  will  be  considered  presently, 
and,  in  i860,  the  Royal  Society  and  the  Royal  College  of  Physicians 
were  both  approached  by  the  Society  of  Apothecaries  with  a  view 
of  surrendering  the  'garden  to  one  of  them.  The  offer  was  refused 
by  these  bodies,  and  it  was  not  until  1 898  that  the  Society  was  able 
to  free  itself  from  the  garden  and  to  pass  it  over  to  other  hands. 
The  following  is  an  epitome  of  the  principal  improvements  carried 
out  in  the  garden  during  the  period  which  we  have  just  considered : 
In  1 77 1  the  garden  was  embanked  on  the  river  side  to  reclaim 
ground  that  had  been  encroached  upon,  and  in  the  following  year  a 
rockery  was  constructed  from  materials  presented  by  Stanesby 
Alchorne,  John  Chandler  and  Sir  Joseph  Banks.  In  1787  a  quan- 
tity of  loam  was  brought  from  Sion  and  "  black  mould  "  from  Wim- 
bledon, and  shortly  after  the  appointment  of  William  Anderson  in 
1 814  it  is  once  more  on  record  that  the  garden  was  in  excellent 
order.  This  satisfactory  condition  of  things  appears  to  have  oc- 
curred periodically  with  the  advent  of  a  young  and  energetic  gar- 
dener, and  to  have  waned  with  the  advancing  age  of  the  latter.  We 
accordingly  find  that  when  Lindley  became  Director  of  the  Garden  he 
reported  it  to  be  in  a  very  unsatisfactory  condition,  and  it  was  only 
by  bringing  considerable  pressure  to  bear  on  Anderson  that  com- 
parative order  was  restored.  During  Robert  Fortune's  short  tenure 
of  office  as  gardener  (1846- 1848)  improvements  were  energetically 
prosecuted,  and  this  policy  was  continued  by  his  successor,  Thomas 
Moore,  until  1853;  but  between  the  latter  date  and  1862  the  gar- 
den  went  from  bad  to  worse,  owing  to  insufficient  funds.  A  slight 
revival  took  place  in  1863,  but  the  garden  was  in  a  moribund  condi- 
tion, and  after  Thomas  Moore's  death  there  is  nothing  of  importance 
to  record  until  its  transfer  to  other  hands.  In  1870  the  construction 
of  the  Chelsea  embankment  was  contemplated  by  the  Metropolitan 
