Db. Balfour's Botanical Excursions. 203 



Tlie following paper was road at the mooting of the Botanical Sec- 

 tion, 20th April. 



LVII. Notice of Excursions made from Glasgow with Botanical 

 Pupils during the Summer Session of 1843. By J. II. Balfour, 

 M.D. F.11.S.E. Regius Professor of Botany, 



You are all aware that I am in the habit of making excursions 

 every week with my pupils during the months of May, June, and 

 July; and by so doing I am satisfied that I tend to promote a taste for 

 the science of botany. Nothing adds so much to the interest and 

 plcasuro of a botanical course as practical demonstrations in the fields ; 

 and it is pleasing at the end of each season to recal the adventures 

 with which our various trips have been diversified, and to register the 

 plants which have rewarded our labours. While we thus add to the 

 knowledge of the Flora of our neighbourhood, we at the same time 

 perpetuate the delightful associations connected with the scenes in 

 which we met. 



" All my botanical excursions," says Rousseau, " the several im- 

 pressions which local objects gave, the ideas which in consequence 

 sprung up, the little incidents which blended into the scene, — all these 

 have produced a delightful impression which the sight of my herbarium 

 rekindles. * * * * It is this association which makes botany so charm- 

 ing ; it recalls back to the imagination all those ideas which afford the 

 purest pleasure. Meadows, water, woods, and the inward content- 

 ment which dwells among such objects, are incessantly brought forward 

 to the memory." 



To these excursions may be applied the following remarks of Dr. 

 Johnston of Berwick: — " They afford tlie stated means of indulging a 

 principle bound up with our frame and constitution ; for He who made 

 nature all beauty to the eye, implanted at the same time in his rational 

 creatures an instinctive perception of that beauty, and with it joined 

 indissolubly a balm and virtue that operate through life. You have 

 the proof of this in the gaiety of the infant swayed only by external 

 influences; in the child's love of the daisy and the enamelled fields; in 

 the girl's haunt by the primrose bank or rushy brook; in the school- 

 boy's truant steps by briery brake or flowery shaw, by troutiug streams 

 or nutting wood ; in the trysting tree and green lanes of love's age ; in 

 the restless activity that sends us adrift in search of the picturesque; 

 in the * London pride ' of the citizen ; in the garden of retired leisure ; 

 in the prize-flower that lends its pride and interest to old ago. Yes, 

 there is a pre-ordained and beneficial influence of external nature over 

 the constitution and mind of man which these excursions foster and 

 encourage, and therein lies, in no small degree, their usefulness. The 

 landscape before and around us becomes our teacher, and from the 

 lesson there is no escape. Every cultivated mind must be improved 

 by feeling the impulse of that beauty which has wooed it to peace, of 



