I wonder if it will strike anyone on reading this that the sins of the botanist have been inherited in some degree by the modern gardener ?

The book is dedicated to William Roscoe of Liverpool. Rare and interesting plants from all parts of the world are figured here, and many of them are uncommon to this day. Some are familiar garden plants, such as Rosemary-leaved Lavender Cotton, which, the author tells us, 'Clusius says he met with on the sloping sides of some hills near Narbonne, in the year 1552, when travelling with his friend, the celebrated Rondeletius, from Carcassonne to Montpellier. It is said to grow in other parts of the South of France, as well as in Spain, chiefly on open hills near the coast. It bears our climate in the open border, flowering, though very rarely, in August. We receive it from the Botanic Garden of Liverpool by favour of Mr. John Shepherd.'

Such a passage, one of many, seems to stretch a hand across the centuries, and explains the kind of charm these old books have for those who like them. The plates are carefully drawn and well coloured. This book contains many plants from New Holland which must then have been rare; some are noted as grown in gardens at Paddington, some as never having flowered in Europe at all. It is certainly an interesting book.

1810. 'The Gardener's Kalendar,' by Walter Nicol. This is the earliest of my gardening directories, and it is not illustrated. It is an excellent little book, but one learns nothing from it except that nearly all we know now was known then.

1810. 'A Small Family Herbal,'by R. J. Thornton, M.D., interesting as it claims to be illustrated by Thomas Bewick. The little woodcuts of plants and flowers are charming. The arrangement of the book is sensible and clear, and has, at the end of the medical part, some receipts for currant wine, elder wine, etc.

1812. 'A Family Herbal,'by Sir John Hill, M.D, The illustrations are coarse, and not well drawn, though hand-painted. It is a typical book of the day, when there were so many of the same kind.

1812. 'The New Botanic Garden. Illustrated with 133 plants, engraved by Sansom from the original pictures, and coloured with the greatest exactness from drawings by Sydenham Edwards.' There is considerable boldness and character about these drawings of ordinary-garden plants and flowers, but the colour has changed on several of them. Like other books of the period, the flowers are illustrated and described in an absolutely chance and desultory way; the only exception is when the authors confine themselves to one family, like Andrews"Heathery,'or Jacquin's 'Oxalises.'What is striking in all these books is the beautiful paper and printing. The drawing and painting are just beginning to decline.

1814 (about). 'The Botanic Garden,' by B. Maund. I think this the most useful, from a modern gardener's point of view, of all the old books in my possession. Nothing approaches it for instructiveness in herbaceous plants till we get to Robinson's 'English Flower Garden.

'The complete set, consisting of sixteen volumes, is difficult to find, though odd volumes or broken sets are often advertised. This lovely 'Botanic Garden 'is arranged on an entirely new system. It is purely gardening and botany, no medicine at all. The volumes are quarto, and the illustrated page is divided into four. Each square is filled with an illustration from a flowering plant, every one of which-from the tallest Hollyhocks to the smallest Alpine-is drawn exactly the same size, to fill the space. This, to my mind, is a grave fault, continued to this day in flower illustration.

In some of the old Dutch books which I have seen, but, alas ! do not possess, they had a plan of drawing the flowering branch, life size, in the middle of the page, with a small drawing in the corner representing the growth of the whole plant. This is a sensible and instructive method. I should like all flower illustration to be exactly the size of a fine specimen in Nature, quite regardless of filling or non-filling the page. To give a correct impression of the plant illustrated is very much more important than attempting to make uniform or even artistic pictures.

But to return to Maund. The letterpress follows the illustrations, one page to each plant, and the following characteristics are given above the drawing in every case:-(1) Name of country the plant comes from, (2) height, (3) when it flowers, (4) duration of plant, (5) when first cultivated. This gives, at a glance, a comprehensive idea of the plant. There are constant allusions through the book to Parkinson, Gerarde, and other old botanists. The earlier plates are far superior, better drawn, and more delicately coloured than those in the later volumes, In the twenty-five years which were covered by the serial issue of this publication the decline of flower-painting marched apace.

1814. 'Flore Medicale. Decrite par F. P. Chaumeton, Docteur en Medecine. Peinte par Madame E. P-----et par P. J. F. Turpin.'This is a lovely book in eight octavo volumes. The illustrations are most delicate and fine, and in the Redoute manner. He influenced all flower-painting at that time in Paris, professional as well as amateur. Flower-painting only ceased to be good when it was no longer considered the handmaid of botany and medicine, which necessitated quite a different order of merit and precision from what was required for mere flower illustration for gardening purposes. One of the useful and uncommon idiosyncrasies of this book is that at the top of each page describing the plate the name of the plant is given in seven European languages. The curative properties of various medicines are named, but there are, alas ! no cooking receipts. This is what is said about Cardoons, the vegetable so little used in England because the cooks do not know how to dress it:'Le Cardon Cynara cardunculus dont les feuilles, prodigieusement amples, deviennent, en blanchissantr une de nos meilleures plantes potageres. La culture en a fait des vari6t6s et des sous-variet6s, dont deux d6pouillees d'epines sont plus faciles a manier, cependant on prefere au cardon d'Espagne, tout inerme qu'il est, le cardon de Tours, arme d'epines longues et tres aigues. Celui-ce est moins sujet a monter; ses cotes sont plus grosses, plus tendres, et beaucoup plus delicates. Le professeur Gilibert a connu un medecin qui depuis dix ans prenait tous les matins un verre de decoction des feuilles vertes de cardon, avec la persuasion intime que ce remede l'avait gueri d'un engorgement au foie, et en prevenait le retour.'It is curious how, in these old books, the faith seems always to have been in what was put into the water, not in the good tumblerful of any hot liquid-plain water being perhaps the best of all, though no doubt in any decoction of vegetable there would be small quantities of soda. The book is full of all kinds of interesting information, and there are constant allusions to the use of vegetables in all sorts of illnesses, especially gout and stone. There is an article in the 'Edinburgh Review 'of November 1810 on the uses of vegetarianism for the cure of stone. It seems now as if we were once more tending towards the system of Aber-nethy, who lived in the early part of the century. The recommendation he gave to his patients was: 'Live on sixpence a day, and earn it.'