148 Chapters i7i Modern Botany chap. 



we proceed to deepen our acquaintance with this ? Al- 

 though, as in every study, difficulties are not lacking, the 

 student may here start from common experience and Avith 

 advantages common to few sciences — those of observation 

 in his hohday walk and study in his general reading. 



" Aspects of Nature," Vegetation and Landscapes of 

 the World. — Let him search out in the nearest library a 

 famous yet too much forgotten book, Humboldt's Cosmos^ or 

 at any rate run through his Aspects of Natiax with its 

 passages of imperishable description ; let him turn over 

 the stately folios of botany and travel in an old library, 

 and look over the plates of Martius's Palms and the like. 

 Let him read Darwin's Naiiiralisfs Voyage^ Wallace's Malay 

 Archipelago^ his Tropical Nature, and Island Life ; glean- 

 ing too the descriptive passages of books of travel, even 

 by non-botanists, so gaining detail from one book and 

 colour from another until he has some general idea of the 

 vegetation of the world so far as his accessible library 

 resources go. The plates of, say, the Botany of the 

 Challenger Expedition will thus get colour from the glow- 

 ing prose pictures of Kingsley's dying voyage : Stanley's 

 dark forest, Ruskin's alpine flower- meadow and lichened 

 rocks, Wordsworth's daffodils — all will help to fill this 

 gallery of the imagination. But why should this gallery 

 be in the imagination only ? To make these thought repre- 

 sentations science, they must be permanent and precise, 

 ordered and complete. Here begins the interest of the 

 collections of a botanic garden, especially where geographi- 

 cally arranged, as partly at Kew, or notably at Berlin. Yet 

 to make all this more real and vivid, we need pictures. For 



We're made so that we love 

 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 

 Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see ; 

 And so they are better, painted — better to us, 



