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culars. But an author himself ought to be the last per- 

 son in the world to look for such authority or to repose 

 upon it. The more he has done, the more he will find to 

 do, and, if the world should be disposed to give him cre- 

 dit for any thing, the more he will be aware of the duty 

 and the difficulty of not misleading its confidence or dis- 

 appointing its expectations. When science has been long 

 and extensively cultivated, and is become an object of 

 great popular attention, it assumes a very different cha- 

 racter from the abstruse pursuits of the cloister or the 

 schools, or the speculations of a few recluse and abstracted 

 proficients. TNTo study has undergone a more remarkable 

 change in this respect than botany. From its earliest dawn 

 as a science, in the writings of the Greeks and Arabians, 

 almost to our own time, it has been considered in no other 

 light than as a branch of medical study ; and even the 

 highest praise bestowed upon this, his favourite pursuit, 

 by the great Haller, is, that " it equals every branch of 

 medical science in utility, and surpasses every one in 

 agreeableness." The chief object of the earliest and most 

 learned botanists, after the revival of literature, was to 

 ascertain the plants used in medicine by the ancients ; and 

 however imperfectly described in their works, the vege- 

 table kingdom was to these botanical physicians a great 

 storehouse of remedies, whose recorded qualities were 

 scarcely to be contested or examined, provided the indi- 

 vidual plants could be settled beyond dispute. This in- 

 deed was the great difficulty, — to the more or less com- 

 plete removal of which we are indebted for the existence 

 of botany as a learned pursuit; which having engaged, 

 and often baffled, the powers of many a first-rate genius, 

 has taken its rank among the more distinguished studies 

 of philosophers. The attention of many following ages was 

 devoted to the mere discrimination of one kind of plant 

 from another, before any ideas of the necessity or the 

 principles of arrangement, much less of the constitution 

 and ceconomy of vegetable bodies, or of sound principles 



