'From the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth century it was implicitly and almost universally believed that in the western islands of Scotland certain geese, of which the nesting-places were never found, instead of being hatched from eggs, like other birds, were bred from "shell-fish" which grew on trees. Upon the shores where these geese abounded, pieces of timber and old trunks of trees covered with barnacles were often seen, which had been stranded by the sea. From between the partly opened shells of the barnacles protruded their plumose cirrhi, which in some degree resemble the feathers of a bird. Hence arose the belief that they contained real birds. The fishermen persuaded themselves that these birds within the shells were the geese whose origin they had been previously unable to discover, and that they were thus bred, instead of being hatched, like other birds, from eggs.' Mr. Lee states that the old botanist Gerarde had, in 1597, the audacity to assert that he had witnessed the transformation of the shell-fish into geese. What Gerarde states, as I read it, is that something like a bird fell out of the shell into the sea, 'where it gathereth feathers, and groweth to a fowle bigger than a mallard and lesser than a goose.' He distinctly says that if it fell on the ground it died.

The drawing of the plants throughout Gerarde's book is more delicate and finished than in Parkinson's.

1691. I have a little gardener's almanack of this date. My copy is the '8th edition, and has many useful additions.' This book is without illustrations except for a frontispiece of a young man and young woman admiring a garden through a doorway. The woman is attended by a page, who is holding a modern-looking sunshade. This is curious, as umbrellas did not, I believe, come into general use till very much later.

1693. Evelyn publishes his translation of 'The Com-pleat Gard'ner, written by the famous Monsieur de la Quintinye, Chief Director of all the Gardens of the French King.' They must have been wonderful gardens, those of Louis XIV.; and one of the most beautiful hand-coloured flower books in the library of the museum at South Kensington was executed by order of the king for Madame de Montespan. This translation of Evelyn's has some interesting little illustrations of gardens, plans of beds, fruit-trees, pruning, etc. The frontispiece is a portrait of Evelyn in a hideous wig of the day.

1710. I have an English Herbal by William Salmon, doctor to Queen Anne. It contains a most fulsome dedication to the queen. The type of man who even in that century was capable of publishing such an effusion would be very likely, I think, to have caused the death of all Queen Anne's children, while quite convinced all the time that they died solely by the will of Almighty God. What a curious person that Queen Anne must have been, who allowed the great category of persecuting laws against the Catholics in Ireland to be framed in her reign, and whom Horace Walpole called 'Goody Anne, the wet-nurse of the Church '! The book is purely medical, and is supposed to be principally written for the use of doctors, but it describes flowering garden plants as well as the wild ones. It has a large, coarsely executed frontispiece, mostly torn out in my copy. The drawings of the plants show no artistic improvement over Parkinson's, but are much in the same style.

1739. 'New Improvements of Planting and Gardening, both Phylosophical and Practical, by Richard Bradley.' This is a small book with rather good copper-plates, and interesting as showing the researches and ideas of an intelligent man just previous to the illuminating of botany through the works of Linnaeus, who in 1739 was only thirty-two. He knew that earthworms were hermaphrodites, but from a text of Scripture he was convinced that plants have their seeds in themselves, and that every plant contained in itself male and female powers. The common Aucuba, so long a puzzle to botanists, only received its green-leaved pollen-bearing mate from Japan towards the middle of this century. Before that it was only propagated by cuttings, and never bore any red berries. The gardening books of the last century are full of useful hints, as gardening was then practised and written about by men of the highest education; and very often this was done solely for botanical and what they called 'philosophical' reasons. Sometimes the childish earnestness of their ignorance concerning facts now known to every schoolchild accentuates the extraordinary advance and increased popularising of knowledge since that day.

1732. 'Hortus Elthamensis, by Johanne Jacobo Dillenio, M.D.' Two folio volumes published in London, and interesting as showing the general development of the improved power of illustrating. The plates are coloured by hand, and contain many figures of Cape Aloes, Geraniums, and other African plants, either depicted with their roots or as growing out of the ground. The text is in Latin.

1771. 'Uitgezochte Planten, by Christ. Jacob Trew, Georgius Dionysius Ehret, Joh. Jacob Haid.' The characteristic of this large folio is that it begins with very fine separate portraits of the three authors. One seems to have been the botanist, one the artist, and one the engraver. It was brought out at Amsterdam by subscription, as was so common with handsome books in those days. The book begins with a long list of subscribers. The flower-plates are extremely fine, very strongly coloured, and as fresh and bright as the day they were painted, each page being covered with a sheet of dark-grey thick hand-made paper, such as Turner loved to sketch upon. One of the things figured is the Japanese plant, Bocconia cordata ('Plumed Poppy,' Robinson calls it), which we have been in the habit of thinking a new plant in our gardens. Many of the plates are interesting and a few remarkable, and the botanical details of the flowers beautifully drawn, some natural size and some magnified.