[171] A pair of these soup tureens and covers were given as early as 1722 by William Fitzgerald, Bishop of Clogher. [Illustration: (Decorative chapter heading)] CHAPTER XI. THE BOTANICAL GARDENS AND HERBARIUM. “_The spleen is seldom felt where Flora reigns._” In the year 1711 there was a Lecturership of Botany in connection with the Medical School of Trinity College, and there was apparently a “Physic Garden” near the School, extending from the Anatomy House towards Nassau Street, as seen on Rocque’s Map (_ante_, p. 187). Dr. Nicholson was the first Lecturer; he published a pamphlet of some 40 pages, entitled _Methodus plantarum, in horto medico collegii Dublinensis, jamjam disponendarum_, Dublini, 1712, which the writer has not seen. The garden could not have been on a very large scale, but it would appear to have supplied the needs of the School for over fifty years, for it is not until during the Lecturership of Edward Hill that we find that the garden was transferred to the neighbourhood of Harold’s Cross, where it was in part the private property of the Lecturer on Botany, but assisted by a grant in aid from the College. Dr. Stubbs[172] tells us that “in 1801 a Curator was appointed, and that in March, 1805, his salary was fixed at £130 yearly, out of which he was to employ two labourers all the year round, and two additional labourers from March to December.” Mr. Hill retired from the Lecturership in 1800, which, on the passing of the Act 25 George III. (1785), “for establishing a complete School of Physic in Ireland,” had been made into a University Professorship. There was some difference of opinion between Hill and the College authorities as to the value of the plants and houses, and in the College accounts for 1803 there occurs the following entry:--“Dr. Hill, allowed him by the award of the arbitrators, to whom the cause between the College and him concerning the Botany Garden was referred, £618 19s. 8d.” The two last decades of the last century were noteworthy, from a botanical point of view, for the immense interest that was taken in Great Britain and Ireland about the cultivation of exotic plants; the latter voyages of Captain Cook, and those of Captain Vancouver, had, through the zeal of Banks, Solander, and Menzies--to mention only a trio of the worthies of that period--been the means of bringing to the Kew Gardens many most interesting plants; the publication by Aiton of his _Hortus Kewensis_, a catalogue of the plants cultivated in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and of Francis Bauer’s _Delineations of Exotic Plants_ cultivated in the same gardens, had given a fresh impetus to their study, and from about this date the period of the scientific Botanic Garden may be said to date, and the day of the “Physic Garden” to end.