458 PEATTIE 



nomenclature "stick." Linnaeus was not the first naturalist who ever went 

 to Lapland to see living subarctic and arctic plants instead of journeying to 

 museums and libraries to study dead or merely described organisms. But he 

 was the first to breathe life and glory into the subject. He taught the world 

 the importance and the beauty of arctic Nature. He overtook and outstripped 

 all his predecessors on the great north road, because he knew how to write 

 popularly. And because he was a smatter-artist he pulled everything to- 

 gether into an ecological whole. If he had been as good and pure a botanist 

 as my midwestern laboratory assistant he would never have written the 

 Lachesis Lapponica and the Flora Lapponica. 



So few botanists have ever read much Linnaeus except for a hasty refer- 

 ence now and again to the Species Plantarum that I am going to suggest, if 

 you want to know what good popularizing is, that you read the Lachesis in 

 its entirety, and in the Flora peruse at least certain pages. His account of 

 Polytrichum convmune, for instance, deals with a moss so base, common, and 

 and popular that I cannot remember any other botanist who has one interest- 

 ing thing to say about it. The importance of Sphagnum is better developed by 

 Linnaeus than by any subsequent botanist whose work has fallen under my 

 eye. His accounts of the mismanagement of the Norway spruce and the Scots 

 fir show how his mind could stray to the principles of forestry before any 

 forestry existed. The expose of water hemlock (Cicuta virosa) as a stock- 

 poisoning plant is a piece of original research that put an end to age-old 

 superstitions. Linnaeus even manages to popularize a Carex, for which he is 

 surely entitled to some kind of honorable mention, since nobody seems to 

 have done so since. 



"Some of the early botanists like Gerard," wrote Thoreau, back in 1860, 

 "were prompted and compelled to describe their plants, but more of them 

 nowadays only measure them, as it were. The former is affected by what he 

 sees, and so inspired to portray it; the latter merely fills out a schedule pre- 

 pared for him, makes a description pour servir. ... I rarely read a sentence 

 in a botany which reminds me of flowers or living plants. Very few, indeed, 

 write as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe." 



Is Thoreau justified in these rankling charges — that botanists seldom 

 write "as if they had seen the thing they pretend to describe"? And does 

 he overestimate Gerard and the other herbalists, whom most of us were 

 taught to look upon as old wind-bags of an age of (comparative) botanical 

 ignorance? Let us see for ourselves. Here (without revealing its identity as 

 yet) is a description of a well-known species by a preeminent modern botanist: 



"Aments lateral, terminating in short spurs or branches of a year's growth 

 or more, short or globular, developed in early spring; the staminate from 

 leafless buds; the pistillate mostly with leaves below. Anther locules opening 

 transversely. Pollen grains simple, globular. Leaves linear, 2.5-3 mm. long, 

 soft, deciduous, very many in a circular cluster on the short spurs, developed 



