A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins. Johann Beckmann
one day as plentiful, of our own growth, as the Portuguese oranges, though there will, in all appearance, be some deficiency in the taste253.” As the Baron Munchausen’s garden at Schwobber was in the absence of the proprietor, as Volkamer says, under the care of J. F. Berner, canon of the cathedral of St. Boniface, he probably may have had some share in rendering this service to horticulture.
This fruit was produced also in the garden of Dr. Volkamer at Nuremberg, and in that of Dr. F. Kaltschmid at Breslau, almost about the same time. The latter was so fortunate as to bring it to maturity so early as 1702, and he sent some of it then for the first time to the imperial court. At Frankfort on the Maine it was first produced in 1702254; and at Cassel in 1715, by the skill of Wurstorfs, the head gardener.
Holland procured the first ripe ananas from the garden of De la Court, whom Miller calls Le Cour, in the neighbourhood of Leyden. As a great many plants were sold out of this garden to foreigners, and as the English had theirs first from it, many are of opinion that Europe is indebted for the first possession of this fruit to De la Court, and his gardener William de Vinck255.
I shall here take occasion to mention a circumstance which belongs also to the history of gardening. Before the cultivation of the ananas was introduced, the Dutch had begun to employ tanner’s bark for making forcing-beds. From them the English learned this improvement, and the first forcing-beds in England were made at Blackheath in Kent, in 1688, and employed for rearing orange-trees; but about the year 1719, much later than in Holland, ananas became more common, and forcing-beds were in much greater use256.
This plant, the history of which I have given, received from Plumier257, who first distinguished its characters, the name of Bromelia258, after the Swedish naturalist, whose remembrance deserves to be here revived. Olof Bromelius was born in 1639, at Oerebro, where his father carried on trade. He studied physic at Upsal, disputed there in 1667 de Pleuritide, and in 1668 taught botany at Stockholm. In 1672 he was physician to the embassy to England, and afterwards to that to Holland, where, in 1673, he received the degree of doctor at Leyden, and wrote a dissertation De Lumbricis. On his return to his native country, in 1674, he became a member of the college of physicians at Stockholm; but in 1691 he was city physician to Gottenburg, and provincial physician in Elsburg and Bahuslan, in which situation he died in the year 1705. His botanical writings are Lupologia, and Chloris Gothica259. His son, Magnus von Bromel, is the author of Lithographia Suecana.
[Within the few last years, large numbers of pine-apples have been imported into this country from the Bahamas, where they are grown as turnips are grown in our fields. They are sold comparatively speaking at an extremely moderate price, and those that have become somewhat spoilt by the long carriage are hawked about the streets of London at a halfpenny or penny per slice. They are however vastly inferior in flavour to the pines cultivated in our hot-houses, but it is to be expected, from the considerable demand, that greater care will be bestowed on their cultivation, and the markets of London be regularly supplied with a much improved kind.]
FOOTNOTES
248 La Historia General de las Indias. Sevilla, 1535, fol. lib. xvii. c. 13. [An earlier notice of the pine-apple had been given by Andræa Navagero in his letter to Rannusio, dated from Seville, May 12, 1526. He says, “I have also seen a most beautiful fruit, the name of which I do not recollect: I have eaten of it, for it was imported fresh. It has the taste of the quince, together with that of the peach, with some resemblance also of the melon: it is fragrant, and is truly of most delicious flavour.”—Lettere di xiii Huomini Illustri.]
249 Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amerique. Par André Thevet. Anvers, 1558.
250 Voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amerique. Par J. de Lery. Genève, 1580, 8vo, p. 188.
251 Rerum Med. novæ Hispaniæ Thesaurus. Rome, 1651. fol.
252 The accounts given by Acosta and Linschotten may be seen in Bauhini Histor. Plantarum, iii. p. 95. Kircher in his China Illustrata says, “That fruit which the Americans and people of the East Indies, among whom it is common, call the ananas, and which grows also in great abundance in the provinces of Quantung, Chiamsi, and Fokien, is supposed to have been brought from Peru to China.”
253 See Leibnitz, Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain (Œuv. Phil.), p. 256, Amst. 1765, 4to.
254 Lersner, Chronik, ii. p. 824.
255 Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary, i. p. 132. Lueder, Wartung der Küchengewächse. Lubeck, 1780, 8vo, p. 248.
256 Miller, ii. p. 824. Lueder, p. 39. That putrid bark forms an excellent manure, had been before remarked by Lauremberg, in Horticultura, p. 52.
257 Nova Plantarum Americanarum Genera. Parisiis 1708, 4to, p. 46.
258 [The plants producing the pine-apple have been separated by Prof. Lindley under the name Ananassa from the allied genus Bromelia, after which the Natural Order Bromeliaceæ takes its name.]
259 Halleri Bibl. Botan. i. p. 640.
SYMPATHETIC INK.
If we give this name to any fluid, which when written with, will remain invisible till after a certain operation, such liquids were known in very early periods. Among the methods, with which Ovid teaches young women to deceive their guardians, when they write to their lovers260, he mentions that of writing with new milk, and of making the writing legible by coal-dust or soot. Ausonius proposes the same means to Paulinus261; but his commentators seem not to have fully understood his meaning; for favilla is not to be explained by favilla non modice calida, as Vinetus has explained it, but by fuligo. That word is often employed by the poets in the same sense. As a proof of it, Columella, speaking of the method, not altogether ineffectual, and even still used, of preserving plants from insects by soot, calls it nigra favilla; and afterwards, when mentioning the same method, free from poetical fetters, he says fuliginem quæ supra focos tectis inhæret262. It may be easily perceived, that instead of milk any other colourless and glutinous juice might be employed, as it would equally hold fast the black powder strewed over it. Pliny,