It was in the early years of the seventeenth century that the King’s physician bought a piece of waste ground--a _butte_ formed of the refuse of centuries accumulated there--for the culture of the multitudinous herbs and plants which made up the pharmacopia of the age. Thus was born the “Jardin Royal de herbes médicinales” laid out in 1626. Chairs of botany, pharmacy, surgery were instituted and endowed, and in 1650 the garden was thrown open to the public. A century later Buffon was named superintendent of the royal garden. He set himself to reorganize and enlarge. The amphitheatre, the natural history galleries, the chemistry laboratories, the fine lime-tree avenue are all due to him. Distinguished naturalists succeeded one another as directors of the garden, and after the death of Louis XVI a museum of natural history and a menagerie were set up with what was left of the King’s collection at Versailles. Additions and improvements were made in succeeding years till, after the outbreak of war in 1870, the Jardin was bombarded by the Prussians, and during the siege its live-stock largely drawn upon to feed the population of Paris. The garden and its buildings have been added to frequently. The labyrinth is on the site of the hillock bought by Guy de la Brosse, who first laid it out. A granite statue marks the spot where he and two notable travellers were buried. Surrounding streets record the names of great naturalists of different epochs. In Rue Geoffroy St-Hilaire, once Rue Jardin du Roi, No. 5, now the Police Station, was built in 1760. At No. 30 a wheel once worked turned by the water of the Bièvre, now a malodorous drain-stream hidden beneath the pavement. No. 36 was Buffon’s home. Here he died in 1788. At No. 37 lived Daubenton. At No. 38 stood in olden days the great gate, the Porte-Royale, of the Jardin du Roi, with to its left the hall, a narrow space at that time, where the great surgeon Dionis described to a marvelling assembly of students his wonderful discoveries (1672-73). That small _cabinet_ was the nucleus of the great anthropological museum of succeeding centuries. In Rue Cuvier, in its early days Rue Derrière-les-Murs de Ste-Victoire, describing accurately its situation, we see at No. 20 a modern fountain (1840) on the site of one put there in 1671 and traces of the abbey St-Victor in the courtyard. The pavilion “de l’Administration” of the Garden is the ancient hôtel Jean Debray (1650), inhabited subsequently by several men of note. At No. 47 Cuvier died in 1832. In the eighteenth-century _fiacres_, a recently introduced manner of getting about, were to be hired at No. 45. The eleventh-century Rue Linné shows many vestiges of the past. We see Gothic arches of the vanished abbey at No. 4.