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 the rib of Adam; yet is there no rivality with garden contrivance and herbary; for if Paradise were planted the third day of the creation, as wiser divinity concludeth, the nativity thereof was too early for horoscopy: gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.

Of deeper doubt is its topography and local designation; yet being the primitive garden, and without much controversy seated in the east, it is more than probable the first curiosity, and cultivation of plants, most flourished in those quarters. And since the ark of Noah first touched upon some mountains of Armenia, the planting art arose again in the east, and found its revolution not far from the place of its nativity, about the plains of those regions. And if Zoroaster were either Cham, Chus, or Mizraim, they were early proficients therein, who left, as Pliny delivereth, a work of agriculture.

However, the account of the pensile or hanging gardens of Babylon, if made by Semiramis, the third or fourth from Nimrod, is of no slender antiquity; which being not framed upon ordinary level of ground, but raised upon pillars, admitting under-passages, we cannot accept as the first Babylonian gardens,—but a more eminent progress and advancement in that art than any that went before it; somewhat answering or hinting the old opinion concerning Paradise itself, with many conceptions elevated above the plane of the earth.

Nabuchodonosor (whom some will have to be the famous