Youth's
Ideas Are So Imaginative, And Bring Together Things That Are So Widely
Separated.
Conscience told me I had no business to read about poisons;
but there was a fearful fascination in hemlock, and I recollect tasting a
little bit - it was very nasty.
At this day, nevertheless, if any one
wishes to begin a pleasant, interesting, unscientific acquaintance with
English plants, he would do very well indeed to get a good copy of
Culpepper. Grey hairs had insisted in showing themselves in my beard
when, all those weary years afterwards, I thought I would like to buy the
still older Englishman, Gerard, who had no Linnaeus to guide him, who
walked about our English lanes centuries ago. What wonderful scenes he
must have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants
that are now scarce were common, and the old ploughs, and the curious
customs, and the wild red-deer - it would make a good picture, it really
would, Gerard studying English orchids! Such a volume! - hundreds of
pages, yellow of course, close type, and marvellously well printed. The
minute care they must have taken in those early days of printing to get
up such a book - a wonderful volume both in bodily shape and contents.
Just then the only copy I could hear of was much damaged. The cunning old
bookseller said he could make it up; but I have no fancy for patched
books, they are not genuine; I would rather have them deficient; and the
price was rather long, and so I went Gerardless. Of folk-lore and
medicinal use and history and associations here you have hints. The
bottom of the sack is not yet; there are the monographs, years of study
expended upon one species of plant growing in one locality, perhaps; some
made up into thick books and some into broad quarto pamphlets, with most
beautiful plates, that, if you were to see them, would tempt you to cut
them out and steal them, all sunk and lost like dead ships under the
sand: piles of monographs. There are warehouses in London that are choked
to the beams of the roof with them, and every fresh exploration furnishes
another shelf-load. The source of the Nile was unknown a very few years
ago, and now, I have no doubt, there are dozens of monographs on the
flowers that flourish there. Indeed, there is not a thing that grows that
may not furnish a monograph. The author spends perhaps twenty years in
collecting his material, during which time he must of course come across
a great variety of amusing information, and then he spends another ten
years writing out a fair copy of his labours. Then he thinks it does not
quite do in that form, so he snips a paragraph out of the beginning and
puts it at the end; next he shifts some more matter from the middle to
the preface; then he thinks it over. It seems to him that it is too big,
it wants condensation.
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