The Scottish Naturalist. iy 



straightforwardness. Many of his records even of the reputed dis- 

 coveries are very minute; to several plants, such as Draba aizoides, 

 and Scncbiera didy?na, he states that, not being able to obtain wild 

 specimens, he sends some from his garden. 



Dr. Arnott, though in some respects an excellent botanist, was 

 not well qualified for preparing an English Flora. He evidently 

 considered plants could be diagnosed with all the precision of a 

 chemical formula, and never mastered the elementary idea of the 

 extreme variability of animate nature and its excessive proneness 

 to change, so that split species or intermediate forms receive at 

 his hands most cavalier treatment, or are summarily dismissed 

 from notice as hybrids. He can see no specific difference be- 

 tween Ranunculus tripartitus and R. aquatilis, or between R. 

 hederaceiis and R. Lenormandi^ except the larger flowers, which 

 " may be caused by the heat of the condensed water which flows 

 into the canal where it grows." Upon this arbitrary botanist Don 

 exercised a most morbid influence, so that no suggestion of dis- 

 honesty or bad faith seemed strong enough to apply to him, for it 

 is not only that he charged Don with making mistakes — mistakes 

 that arc most egregious blunders — but that he asserts that no 

 credence can be given to his statements, because he intentionally 

 misled, either by making false records, or sowing plants, or by 

 distributing plants from his garden as if they had been gathered 

 wild. 



I will admit that Don had little knowledge of geographical 

 distribution or histology ; but he had fully developed a naturalist's 

 keenness of eye, a scientific love of classification which showed 

 itself, not by faggotting plants together in an arbitrary manner in 

 order to conceal his want of knowledge of their extreme variability, 

 but by noticing minute differences ; and he often was enabled to 

 differentiate varieties, which, unimportant as they may be to the 

 arm chair botanist, may and often do prove of material service to 

 the agriculturist or gardener. Above all, Don possessed that 

 divine fire (often absent from the endowed professor) which kept 

 him unwearied at labour ; plodding, it may be, over the spongy 

 morass, or breasting the high and solitary moorland ; or anon 

 climbing with all a fowler's zeal up the high rocky crags of that 

 lovely district of Clova, itself not the least of his discoveries. 

 Too independent in opinion to curry favour with the wealthy, and 

 too fond of science — that hard mistress, in some respects, to the 



B 



