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. He actually
gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he
touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of
window - perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen hundred
years or so, since superstition blighted the progress of pagan Rome. The
work he did! But no one reads Linnaeus now; the folios, indeed, might
moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got into the minds
of men, and the text is of little consequence. The best book he wrote to
read now is the delightful 'Tour in Lapland,' with its quaint pen-and-ink
sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched had been
banged on the paper and so left its impress. I have read it three times,
and I still cherish the old yellow pages; it is the best botanical book,
written by the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical
expedition, and it contains nothing about botany. It tells you about the
canoes, and the hard cheese, and the Laplander's warehouse on top of a
pole, like a pigeon-house; and the innocent way in which the maiden
helped the traveller in his bath, and how the aged men ran so fast that
the devil could not catch them; and, best of all, because it gives a
smack in the face to modern pseudo-scientific medical cant about hygiene,
showing how the Laplanders break every 'law,' human and 'divine',
ventilation, bath, and diet - all the trash - and therefore enjoy the most
excellent health, and live to a great old age. Still I have not succeeded
in describing the immense labour there was in learning to distinguish
plants on the Linnaean system. Then comes in order of time the natural
system, the geographical distribution; then there is the geological
relationship, so to say, to Pliocene plants, natural selection and
evolution. Of that let us say nothing; let sleeping dogs lie, and
evolution is a very weary dog. Most charming, however, will be found the
later studies of naturalists on the interdependence of flowers and
insects; there is another work the dandelion has got to do - endless,
endless botany! Where did the plants come from at first? Did they come
creeping up out of the sea at the edge of the estuaries, and gradually
run their roots into the ground, and so make green the earth? Did Man
come out of the sea, as the Greeks thought? There are so many ideas in
plants. Flora, with a full lap, scattering knowledge and flowers
together; everything good and sweet seems to come out of flowers, up to
the very highest thoughts of the soul, and we carry them daily to the
very threshold of the other world. Next you may try the microscope and
its literature, and find the crystals in the rhubarb.
I remember taking sly glances when I was a very little boy at an old
Culpepper's Herbal, heavily bound in leather and curiously illustrated.
It was so deliciously wicked to read about the poisons; and I thought
perhaps it was a book like that, only in papyrus rolls, that was used by
the sorceress who got ready the poisoned mushrooms in old Rome. 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:
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