answer for his share in the crime. He adroitly contrived to save his chief treasures, including the map so precious to geographical science, but he was banished from the country, and sailed for Batavia on the 2nd January, 1830. His persecuted pupils, sheltered by some of the leading Daimyōs, did not a little to further the cause of European learning in Japan.[1]
Arriving in Holland, Siebold was created a baron and a colonel in the army by the king of that country, and spent the next twenty-nine years in writing his numerous works and arranging his scientific collections in the museums of Leyden, Munich, and Würzburg. More permanent even in their results than these learned labours was his activity in the field of practical botany. To him our western gardens owe the Japanese lilies, peonies, aralias, chrysanthemums, and scores of other interesting and beautiful plants with which they are now adorned.
Meanwhile, Commodore Perry's expedition had burst open Japan. Siebold, in his old age, returned as a semi-official ambassador to the country which he had quitted in disgrace so many years before. This mission was not altogether successful. The times were for war, not for the peaceful negotiations of a man of science. Siebold's proper field was not politics, but learning. It was therefore perhaps no loss to his reputation that a second semi-political expedition to Japan, which Napoleon III. had thought of entrusting to him, was never carried out. Judged by his scientific works and their practical results, Siebold is the greatest of the many great Germans who have contributed so much to the world's knowledge of Japan, Kaempfer in the seventeenth century and Rein in our own day being the other most illustrious names. If small people may be allowed to criticise giants, we would here note that the only weakness discoverable in the early German school of investigators, as
- ↑ A somewhat different account of this incident was printed in previous editions of the present work, on the authority of an obituary article by Gerhard Schirnhofer. The present more trustworthy version was obtained from J. Murdoch, the critical historian of modern Japan, who has collated the original authorities.
