28 The Scottish Naturalist. 



immediate pleasure the botanist enjoys, is the full appreciation 

 of such passages. Who can walk through a lime-tree avenue 

 on a July evening without recalling the passage of Milton, 



"The lime of dewy eve dropping odour sweet." 



This science is the study of beautiful forms ; but you will 

 soon see that it is a beauty according to law, and without 

 irregularity, so much so, that after Chevieul and others had 

 wrought out the laws of colour by prismatic experiment, the 

 resulting laws of complimentary colours might equally have 

 been deduced from the arrangement of colour in flowers. 



As a lever of education botany is invaluable. You are 

 taught to observe. It is in its practical details a science of 

 observation. You are taught to generalise and to classify. If 

 shown a room full of books, and you were asked to arrange 

 them, before you touched a single book you would sit down 

 and determine on some principle to guide you, whether by 

 size, by dates, by authors, or by subjects. It is trile in botany 

 you find the principal already determined, but the practical 

 result is the same. You go forth to nature and investigate its 

 truth. This power or faculty of arrangement is at once the 

 most useful and the rarest of human endowments. 



I need not touch on the pleasures of botanical excursions, 

 the curious beings brought to notice, or the incidents that 

 occur on almost every occasion. 



There is again to be considered the poetry of flowers. By 

 this I mean that analogy that poets have seen in flowers to 

 some virtue or vice, or other human character, or that per- 

 sonal history many of them have. Ophelia says, " There is 

 rosemary, that's for remembrance." There is often a poetry 

 in their very names, especially those named by Linnaeus. A 

 strongly narcotic plant he names after the mother of the furies. 

 He names plants indiscriminately, from the Fates, the Gods, 

 or the Graces of ancient mythology. It is much to be regretted 

 (from a poetical point of view) that modern botanists differ 

 widely from him in this, and will call them by such sesqui- 

 pedalian names as P/euroschysmatyftus, Boen?ii?ighau:cniana. 

 Even the common Scotch names of Blinks, Branks, Taur, or 

 Skellochs are better. 



A most interesting subject is the folk lore of plants still 



