CRITICAL NOTICES OK NEW PUBLICATIONS. 295 



" The ultimate tendency of Botany, as of any other science worthy of 

 cultivation, should be found in some beneficial results to the human race, 

 equivalent to the cost of time and money expended on the pursuit. Unless 

 some such results be in prospect, however distantly, it is difficult to conceive 

 what adequate advantges are to be derived from our sedulous efforts to de- 

 scribe and give names to every peculiarity, form and proportion in plants ; 

 from our voluminous collections of specimens, dried and living, including the 

 productions of nearly every clime and country; from our intense devotion to 

 the devising of systems and classifications ; and from the gi'eat expense of 

 time and nionev necessarily made in effecting all this. Unless there be some 

 prospect of an equivalent return, some reasonable hope of thereby eventually 

 adding much to the stock of power and enjoyment which mankind at present 

 derives from the vegetable world, it will be the duty of political economists 

 to stigmatize botanists as the unproductive consumers or supernumerary 

 drones of society. Now, mere descriptions, mere classifications, mere inven- 

 tion of names, howsoever complete and ingenious, produce nothing to the 

 human race. They only consume time and labour : and, although such oc- 

 cupation may be an agreeable amusement to the parties personally con- 

 cerned in it, "yet, taken alone, it is as valueless to the world as would have 

 been their occupation for an equal length of time at a card-table. We can- 

 not make the earth yield a greater quantity of food and clothing, through 

 means of its vegetable productions, merely by knowing their names, resem- 

 blances and structure. After learning these things, which are not to be 

 undervalued as a groundwork for something more, we must still take other 

 steps, by studying the relations existing between vegetables and the rest of 

 the creation. "One set of these relations is found in the connections estab- 

 lished between vegetation on the one hand, and the physical conditions of its 

 existence on the other; that is to say, the influence of climate, soil and the 

 other external circumstances determinuig the vegetation of the globe, whe- 

 ther tfeneral or special. The more we come to understand these connections, 

 the greater will be our power of modifying them for our benefit. Hitherto, 

 almost all our applied knowledge on this subject has been purely empirical; 

 having been left to farmers and gardeners, who have derived little assistance 

 from technical botanists. Experiments and accidental observations, with 

 some aid from chemistry and mechanical inventions, have enabled practical 

 farmers to augment and improve the vegetable produce of Britain ; but, it is 

 hardly savhig too much, to suggest that a scientific knowledge of the laws of 

 vegetation, though it will be" slowly acquired, must place a future race of 

 cultivators as much above the present workmen, in skill and power, as the 

 scientific chemist of to-day is superior to the cooks and the drug-vendors 

 who were the chemists empirically in the by-gone centuries. The collecting 

 and arranging of facts, such as appear likely to bear upon one department of 

 a study which may become so important to mankind has been my aim 

 hitherto, as it has been the aim of others. No one has yet advanced a step 

 beyond this preliminary labour, in so far as that one department is con- 

 cerned ; and no one can go beyond it, at present. An attempt to do so, 

 would be only a leap from twilight into utter darkness. Even Humboldt 

 himself, so deservedly honoured with the highest reputation as a phytolo- 

 gist, he only collected facts together, and those chiefly the facts ascertained 

 by others, and made an imperiect generalization of them. He could do no 

 more than this, and most assuredly he buill no f^ysteni ; for, how can a system 

 be built, before the constituent materials are half of them jn-ocured ? Here 

 then, is the answer in rejjly to the question of usefulness, construing this 

 in a moral or public sense; but, if it were designed to have only an indivi- 

 dual application, the rejily must be ])Ut on the same ground, by reference to 

 individual tastes. One class of minds derive their intellectual gratification 

 from direct or simiile observation almost exclusively: a second class of minds 

 are more ])lease(I by occupying themselves with the relations between 

 objects or events. It" jilants become objects of interest, the Ibrmcr minds 

 describe and classify them; while tlic'latttr may feel little interest in 



