487 
Professor Schultes to Sir J. E. Smith. 
Dear and noble Sir, Landshut, 1821. 
I considered it as a duty to science, as well as to 
mankind in general, and especially to you, to give 
a translation of your Introduction ; because, with all 
my respect for the Phzlosophia Botanica, I do not 
know better elements of botanythan yours. I am, 
though being a Christian, of the heathen opinion? 
that “ Maxima debetur puero reverentia.” 
Your idea of a grammar of botany is no less 
worthy of the classic solidity you fixed with the 
principles of science; it might perhaps also be con- 
sidered as a true British sneer on those foreign 
botanists who, being totally ignorant of both the 
grammar of their science and of Greek and Latin, 
intrude themselves as authors, or rather as poets in 
botany. In our old time, grammar was studied 
before poetry, but now we see poets in botany who 
can scarce spell the terms of art; and thus we 
might say now of the amabilis scientia what Shak- 
speare once said of poetry,—botany “ has bubbles 
as water has.’ Whata patchwork did not become 
the glossology of some modern botanists! Happy 
that they are kind enough to provide a particular 
dictionary to every botanical pamphlet they send to 
the press. A complete dictionary of all the terms 
now used by different modern botanists would give 
a greater volume almost than any Polyglotten since 
the steeple of Babel, to which we should unavoid- 
