COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

450 COSMOS.
These studies he himself partly executed as paintings, and
partly etched with much spirit. To this period belong the
in flower throughout the winter by maintaining a pleasant degree of heat.
The account of this banquet, exaggerated into something marvellous,
occurs in the Clironica Joannis de Beka, written in the middle of the
fourteenth century (Beka et Heda de Episcopis Ultra jectinis, recogn.
ab. Arn. Buchelio, 1643, p. 79; Jourdain, Recherclies critiques sur I Age.
des Traductions d'Aristote, 1819, p. 331; Buhle, Gesdi. der Philosophic,
th. v. s. 296). Although the ancients, as we find from the excavations
at Pompeii, made use of panes of glass in buildings, yet nothing
has been found to indicate the use of glass or hot houses in ancient hor-
ticulture. The mode of conducting heat by the caldaria into baths might
have led to the construction of such forcing or hothouses, but the
shortness of the Greek and Italian winters must have caused the want
of artificial heat to be less felt in horticulture. The Adonis gardens
(Krj-n-01 Adwvlcoc), so indicative of the meaning of the festival of Adonis,
consisted, according to Bockh, of plants in small pots, which were, no
doubt, intended to represent the garden where Aphrodite met Adonis,
who was the symbol of the quickly fading bloom of youth, of luxuriant
growth, and of rapid decay. The festivals of Adonis were, therefore,
seasons of solemn lamentations for women, and belonged to the
festivals in which the ancients lamented the decay of nature. As I
have spoken in the text of hothouse plants, in contrast, with those
which grow naturally, I would add that the ancients frequently used
the term " Adonis gardens" proverbially, to indicate something which
had shot up rapidly, without promise of perfect maturity or duration.
These plants, which were lettuce, fennel, barley, and wheat, and not
variegated flowers, were forced, by extreme care, into rapid growth in
summer (and not in the winter), and were often made to groAv to
maturity in a period of only eight days. Creuzer, in his Symbolik und
Mythologie, 1841, th. ii. s. 427, 430, 479, und 481, supposes "that strong
natural and artificial heat, in the room in which they were placed, was
used to hasten the growth of plants in the Adonis gardens." The
garden of the Dominican convent at Cologne reminds us of the Greenland
or Icelandic convent of St. Thomas, where the garden was kept
free from snow by being warmed by natural thermal springs, as is
i elated by the brothers Zeni, in the account of their travels (1388-
1404), which, from the geographical localities indicated, must be con-
sidered as very problematical. (Compare Zurla, Viaggiatori Veneziani,
t. ii. pp. 63-69 and ; Hurnboldt, Examen antique de I'Hist, de la Geographic,
t. ii. p. 127.) The introduction in our botanic gardens of
regular hothouses seems to be of more recent date than is generally
were first obtained at the end of the seven-
supposed. Eipe pineapples
teenth century (Beckmann's History of Inventions, Bohn's Standard
in the
Library, 1846< vol. i. pp. 103-106); and Linnaeus even asserts,
Musa Cliffortiana florens Hartecampi, that the first banana which
flowered in Europe was in 1731, at Vienna, in the garden of Prince
Eugene.