“The use of plants is all our life long of that universal importance and concern that we can neither live nor subsist with any decency and convenience, or be said, indeed, to live at all without them. Whatsoever food is necessary to sustain us, whatsoever contributes to delight and refresh us, is supplied and brought forth out of that plentiful and abundant store. And ah! [he exclaims] how much more innocent, sweet, and healthful is a table covered with those than with all the reeking flesh of butchered and slaughtered animals. Certainly man by nature was never made to be a carnivorous animal, nor is he armed at all for prey and rapine, with jagged and pointed teeth and crooked claws sharpened to rend and tear, but with gentle hands to gather fruit and vegetables, and with teeth to chew and eat them.”[127] XVI. EVELYN. 1620-1706. John Evelyn, the representative of the more estimable part of the higher middle life of his time, who has so eloquently set forth the praises of the vegetable diet, also claims with Ray the honour of having first excited, amongst the opulent classes of his countrymen, a rational taste for botanical knowledge. Especially meritorious and truly patriotic was his appeal to the owners of land, by growing trees to provide the country with useful as well as ornamental timber for the benefit of posterity. He was one of the first to treat gardening and planting in a scientific manner; and his own cultivation of exotic and other valuable plants was a most useful example too tardily followed by ignorant or selfish landlords of those and succeeding times. It would have been well indeed for the mass of the people of these islands, had the owners of landed property cared to develope the teaching of Evelyn by stocking the country with various fruit trees, and so supplied at once an easy and wholesome food. _O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona nôrint, Agricolas!... Fundit humo facilem victum justissima Tellus._[128] The family of Evelyn was settled at Wooton, in Surrey. During the struggle between the Parliament and the Court he went abroad, and travelled for some years in France and in Italy, where he seems to have employed his leisure in a more refined and useful way than is the wont of most of his travelling countrymen. He returned home in 1651. At the foundation of the Royal Society, some ten years later, Evelyn became one of its earliest Fellows. His first work was published in 1664, _Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber_. Its immediate cause was the application of the Naval Commissioners to the Royal Society for advice in view of the growing scarcity of timber, especially of oak, in England. A large quantity of the more valuable wood now existing is the practical outcome of his timely publication.