82 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 



as he was able unmolested to make long collecting excursions, 

 to classify and arrange his herbarium or to watch the growth of 

 some specimen from the seed. " Parvenu dans les lieux," he 

 wrote, " oil je ne vols nulles traces d'hommes je respire plus a 

 mon aise comme dans un asyle oii leur haine ne me poursuit plus." 



Later on, he was accompanied by Bernardin de St. Pierre in these 

 country rambles. " We had gone through part of a w^ood," whites 

 Bernardin in an account of one of their joint excursions, " when, 

 in the midst of the solitude, we perceived two young girls, one of 

 whom was arranging the other's hair." It is not unfair to inquire 

 if the amorous J. J., before a scene like this, felt no temporary 

 vacillation in his allegiance to the science of botany. 



While staying at Grenoble, during the course of a botanical 

 excursion with one Sieur Bovier, an advocate of that place, whom 

 our solitary walker, as a mark of especial confidence, had invited to 

 accompany him, Eousseau presently began to refresh himself by 

 eating the fruit of a plant, the Sieur meanwhile remaining at his 

 side, without imitating him and without saying anything. Suddenly 

 a stranger, newly arrived, exclaimed: "Ah, Monsieur, what are 

 you doing ? Don't you know that fruit is poisonous ? " 



"Why did you not warn me?" Eousseau inquired of the 

 Sieur. 



" Oh, Monsieur," said he, " I dared not take that liberty." 



Eousseau smiled at the fellow's " Dauphinoise humilite," and 

 suffered no ill effects from his little collation. 



At first one is inclined to think that J. J.'s interest in botany 

 was only another of his many " affairs de coeur." Closer examina- 

 tion soon shows that it was something more. His book on the 

 elements of botany, consisting of a series of letters addressed to 

 the Duchess of Portland and to other ladies, and his unfinished 

 dictionary of botanical terms, reveal the author as a serious 

 student of the science. Terms like " gymnosperm " and " petiole " 

 came as easily to Eousseau's pen as to the pen of a Malesherbe or 

 Jussieu. He practised, the art of dissection — an example which 

 many botanists of to-day, who are probably ready to snitf at 

 Eousseau's scientific attainments, would do well to follow^ — and 

 he owns to a " passionate attachment to the Sy sterna Natiircd of 

 Linnaeus," which fact alone makes it impossible surely to account 

 him anyone less than a botanist ! 



But this is not to say that Eousseau was a dry-as-dust. 

 " Nothing is more singular," he wrote, " than the rapture, the 

 ecstasy I felt at every observation I made on vegetable structure, 

 and on the play of the sexual parts in fructification. The 

 forks of the long stamina of the Self-heal . . . the explosion 

 of the fruit of Balsam . . . and a hundred little acts of 

 fructification filled me with delight, and I ran about asking 

 people if they had ever seen the horns on the Self-heal, just as 

 La Fontaine asked if Habbakuk had ever been read." 



This could not have been written by Mr. Punch's stereotyped 

 fossil with spectacles, straw hat, baggy trousers, vasculum, and 

 butterfly net — he is a joyless soul, mainly concerned with " a pre- 



