An handsome green-house, one hundred feet in length, and having an hot-house (or, what is called a stove,) appurtenant to it, were erected by subscription. These are furnished with an extensive variety of curious exotics: the plants are all arranged according to the Linnæan[Linnæan] system, and a catalogue of them is printed.
These Gardens are under the government of the chancellor or vice-chancellor of the university, the heads of three of the colleges, and the regius professor of physick; and they are superintended by a lecturer or reader, and a curator.
There is, besides, a Professorship of Botany, in this university; as there is also at Oxford.
The Botanical Garden belonging to the university of Edinburgh, is about a mile from the city, It consists of a great variety of plants, exotic and indigenous. The Professor is botanist to the king, and receives an annual salary of 120l. sterling, for the support of the Garden. A monument to the memory of Linnæus was erected here, by the late Dr. Hope, who first planted the Garden and brought it to perfection.
The Garden of Plants, at Paris, now termed the Museum of Natural History, comprises a space of many acres. It dates its origin as far back as the year 1640, during the reign of Louis XIII. In 1665, it bore the name of Hortus Regius, and exhibited a catalogue of four thousand plants. From that period, it made but slow progress, until Louis XV. placed it under the direction of the Count de Buffon, the celebrated naturalist; to whose anxious care and indefatigable exertions, it owes its present extent and magnificence: it is now under the patronage of the government.
But this institution comprehends, in addition to the Botanical Garden, an extensive chemical laboratory, a cabinet of comparative anatomy, a cabinet of preparations in anatomy and natural history, a large library, a museum of natural history, and a menagérie well stocked. Besides the lectures delivered in the Amphitheatre, erected in these Gardens, the Professors of Botany give their peripatetic lessons, in good weather, to a numerous train of disciples.
“When I have been seated at noon, on a fine day, in the month of August, or in the commencement of May, under one of the majestic ash of the Garden of Plants, with this Elysian scene before me, in the midst of a most profound silence, and of a solitude interrupted only by the occasional appearance of the Professor of Botany and his pupils, I have almost fancied myself,” says the writer of Letters on France and England—(see Am. Rev. No. ii.) “among the groves of the Athenian Academy, and could imagine that I heard the lessons of the “divine” Plato. Here, as well as in the spacious and noble works and gardens of Oxford, which are so admirably calculated for the exercises both of the mind and body, the fancy takes wing, and readily transports the student of antiquity to those venerable seats of knowledge, where the sublime Philosophy of the Greeks was taught, and the masters of human reason displayed their incomparable eloquence:”—
——“the green retreats
Of Academus,[[262b]] and the thymy vale,
Where, oft enchanted with Socratic sounds,