So Many,
Many Books, And Such A Very, Very Little Bit Of Nature In Them!
Though we
have been so many thousand years upon the earth we do not seem to have
done any
More as yet than walk along beaten footpaths, and sometimes
really it would seem as if there were something in the minds of many men
quite artificial, quite distinct from the sun and trees and
hills - altogether house people, whose gods must be set in four-cornered
buildings. There is nothing in books that touches my dandelion.
It grows, ah yes, it grows! How does it grow? Builds itself up somehow of
sugar and starch, and turns mud into bright colour and dead earth into
food for bees, and some day perhaps for you, and knows when to shut its
petals, and how to construct the brown seeds to float with the wind, and
how to please the children, and how to puzzle me. Ingenious dandelion! If
you find out that its correct botanical name is - Leontodon taraxacum - or
- Leontodon dens-leonis - , that will bring it into botany; and there is a
place called Dandelion Castle in Kent, and a bell with the inscription -
John de Dandelion with his great dog
Brought over this bell on a mill cog
- which is about as relevant as the mere words - Leontodon taraxacum - .
Botany is the knowledge of plants according to the accepted definition;
naturally, therefore, when I began to think I would like to know a little
more of flowers than could be learned by seeing them in the fields, I
went to botany. Nothing could be more simple. You buy a book which first
of all tells you how to recognise them, how to classify them; next
instructs you in their uses, medical or economical; next tells you about
the folk-lore and curious associations; next enters into a lucid
explanation of the physiology of the plant and its relation to other
creatures; and finally, and most important, supplies you with the ethical
feeling, the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular
flower. One moderately thick volume would probably suffice for such a
modest round as this.
Lo! now the labour of Hercules when he set about bringing up Cerberus
from below, and all the work done by Apollo in the years when he ground
corn, are but a little matter compared with the attempt to master botany.
Great minds have been at it these two thousand years, and yet we are
still only nibbling at the edge of the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the
young hawthorn in spring. The mere classification - all plant-lore was a
vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great Linnaeus, till
the sexes were recognised, and everything was ruled out and set in place
again. A wonderful man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus
who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and levered our
mental globe a little more perpendicular to the ecliptic.
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