160 NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



whereas the more popular idea considers it to be equivalent to species, 

 as indeed the first chapter of Genesis indicates. 



Lastly, the lesson upon collecting specimens and making an herba- 

 rium we should have been glad to see more full and instructive. The 

 subject has been strangely misunderstood of late ; and the collecting 

 plants and forming an herbarium are at the present day regarded by 

 many able speculative botanists as contemptible occupations. To point 

 out the fallacy of such notions is not our function here ; but it is of all 

 things most important, in an elementary work, to demonstrate fully 

 the subordination of each branch of botany. Collecting plants for the 

 mere sake of having specimens is an unworthy pursuit, in comparison 

 with which collecting for sale is honourable; but a collection made 

 with the view of study, and an herbarium so arranged and kept, as to 

 be the depository of the student's knowledge, and the materials for his 

 further study, is of more importance than even books. To make such 

 a collection and herbarium however requires a very careful naturalist, 

 and in most cases a special training : the plants should be studied in 

 their various aspects before being gathered ; the specimens should be 

 chosen with great judgment ; and the herbarium should either be ac- 

 companied with, or be the key to, the botanist's notes and observa- 

 tions, dissections and drawings. To u know plants," in the full sense 

 of these terms, is impossible, without a large herbarium and a large 

 experience in collecting ; and it is notorious that the love of the her- 

 barium and its specimens amounts to a passion with some of the pro- 

 foundest botanists of this century, whilst all those who have risen to 

 eminence as botanists, in the full acceptation of the word, Linnseus, all 

 the Jussieus, Brown, De Candolle, Lindley, Endlicher, and Asa Gray 

 himself, founded their knowledge upon experience in the field, herba- 

 rium, and garden. Specimens and the herbarium are means, not ends ; 

 and the true botanist should have the same pride in his kortus siccus 

 that the chemist has in his laboratory and preparations, the astronomer 

 in his observatory, and the surgeon in his pathological museum. That 

 these are Professor Gray's views we know ; and in the present state of 

 botany, in the Old World at any rate, they require being brought pro- 

 minently under the notice of the student of that science at the very 

 commencement of his studies. 



