ROUSSEAU AS BOTANIST 83 



occupied name " or a nomen nudum. I doubt, in fact, if it could 

 have been written by anyone except J. J. Eousseau — the senti- 

 mental botanist. 



Of a surety, J. J. could boast of no academic distinctions ; he 

 carried on no original research ; he was a poor observer. He 

 confesses that in botany he did not seek to instruct himself — it 

 was too late for that. His idea was to pursue " a sweet and 

 simple amusement " without any prodigious effort. All that he 

 required was " une pointe et un loup." To him botany was " an idle 

 study," a retreat from the delirium of imagination and the persecu- 

 tion of mankind. If botany, he declared, be studied from motives 

 of ambition and vanity, only to become an author or professor, all 

 the charm of it vanishes, and plants become the instruments of 

 our passion. 



In an amusing passage in the Beveries, he carefully weighs in 

 the balance the respective attractions of the other sciences. The 

 study of minerals, dehghtful as it is, meant costly experiments, 

 furnaces, stifling vapours. Zoology also was a science full of 

 difficulties and embarrassments to the virginal soul. How on 

 earth was J. J. to observe, study, and dissect, to know the birds 

 of the air, the fishes in the sea, and quadrupeds swifter than the 

 wind — creatures " not more disposed to come and offer themselves 

 for my research than I am to run after them and submit them to 

 force." As he rightly observes, the study of animal life is nothing 

 without dissection, and it would, therefore, be necessary for him 

 — J. J. to wit ! — to cut up animals and extract their entrails, 

 '* amid all the frightful apparatus, the corpses, livid flesh, skeletons, 

 disgusting intestines, and pestilential vapours " of an anatomical 

 theatre: " ce n'est pas la sur ma parole que J. J. ira chercher 

 ses amusements." 



A confessed dilettante then if you like, yet it is difficult to 

 believe that Rousseau's influence, as that of many another 

 amateur without hood or diploma, was not salutary and felt. He 

 taught men to regard Nature and botanists to regard plants. 

 Botany was not merely a question of dates and names and dis- 

 quisitions sought after in the dusty parchments of Galen and 

 Dioscorides. Rousseau cared for none of these things. Botanists 

 must search, observe, and conjecture for themselves with the 

 plant before them and the book on the shelf. He insisted on the 

 divorce of botany from medicine, an alliance which hampered 

 research in the pure science and reduced the study of vegetable 

 life to the rank of handmaiden to the pharmacopoeia. J. J. 

 shared Montaigne's antipathy to physic and physicians, and the 

 idea of his beloved plants being brayed in a mortar with a pestle 

 and transformed into pills, plasters, and ointment revolted his 

 romantic soul. Botany — that last stronghold of his imagination 

 — must be jealously guarded against the calamity of defilement by 

 association with such things as fever, stone, gout, epilepsy, and 

 other ills of hateful, unhappy man. 



The fancy likes to dwell upon the picture of those two bizarre 

 misanthropes — Jean Jacques Rousseau and Bernardin de St. 



