THE Missouri Botanical Garden has recently celebrated the

twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation and the New York
Botanical Garden its twentieth anniversary
THE Missouri Botanical Garden has recently celebrated the
twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation and the New York
Botanical Garden its twentieth anniversary. Within these short
periods these gardens have taken rank among the leading
scientific institutions of the world. Botanical gardens were
among the first institutions to be established for scientific
research; indeed Parkinson, the 'botanist royal' of England, on
the title page of his book of 1629, which we here reproduce,
depicts the Garden of Eden as the first botanical garden and
one which apparently engaged in scientific expeditions, for it
includes plants which must have been collected in America.
However this may be, publicly supported gardens for the
cultivation of plants of economic and esthetic value existed in
Egypt, Assyria, China and Mexico and beginning in the medieval
period had a large development in Europe there being at the
beginning of the seventeenth century botanical gardens devoted
to research in Bologna, Montpellier, Leyden, Paris, Upsala and
elsewhere. An interesting survey of the history of botanical
gardens is given in a paper by Dr. A W. Hill assistant director
of the Kew Gardens, prepared for the celebration of the
Missouri Garden, from which we have taken the illustration from
Parkinson and the pictures of Padua and Kew.