II Pitcher Plants 23 



by and by, when the civilised " mania of owning things " 

 has arisen, he collects. At school and college he learns 

 to name and to analyse ; normally too, alas ! to forget 

 all discontent though grammar be substituted for literature, 

 and form in all things for life, and though every outdoor 

 aspect of nature be forgotten during a whole youth 

 wasted in imprisonment between the whitewashed school- 

 room and the ball exercise -yard of his school. Thus 

 prepared, circumstances may make him " a naturalist " 

 again, but now with a difference from his childish starting- 

 point. His first impulse will be to seek his accounts of 

 nature in books and to comment on his predecessor, as 

 naturalists did all through the middle ages, and as most of 

 us do too much still ; if he go beyond this it is in the 

 first place to make a collection ; especially as he has here 

 the lucid logic, the consummate academic discipline 

 handed on from Linnasus to guide him, and so he becomes 

 a systematist — it may be a Bentham or an Agardh ; but if 

 so, concentrating himself on his herbarium, group by group, 

 leaving the insects to their keeper over the way in the 

 Zoological Museum. Or a later medical education (itself of 

 course deeply influenced from the schools) may dominate the 

 preliminary one, and thus we get an anatomist — it may be 

 an Owen or a Huxley — and so far indeed our contemporary 

 university and school presentation of natural science has now 

 actually come — witness the accepted text-books (excellent of 

 course from their point of view) of " Elementary Biology," 

 " Practical Botany," and their various sources and imita- 

 tions. But all this time we have been taking no sufficient 

 note of Darwin. He, happiest as well as greatest of 

 naturalists, has gone straight through school and college, 

 but obviously with but an irreducible minimum of their 

 result upon him. Still fresh from the gardens and wood- 

 lands of childish and boyish home, he passes to his 



