367 



with the help of the dictionavy, he cannot show that either " sorry," 

 or " to fear," or " to be afraid," can possibly mean either dolorous or 

 lachrymose ; and further, the dictionary meanings he has quoted will 

 not even apply to any of them, as they are located in my book. No 

 dictionary can explain the various shades of meaning attached to a 

 large proportion of the words it contains ; and in composition the 

 exact meaning of a word is often to be derived from the context, 

 rather than from the dictionary ; and the same may be said of conver- 

 sation. If I observe, that I am sorry there has been a little rain this 

 morning, does it imply that I am actually grieved, or in grief, about 

 it ? If I say, I fear to-morrow will not be a fine day, or I am afraid 

 Parliament will not meet before spring, does it imply that I " live in 

 terror," that I am " struck with fear," or that I am "terrified," or even 

 " fearful ?" The writer says that " of all these meanings we give the 

 author the benefit, and admit that he used no ' dolorous terms^ made 

 no ' lachrymose observations^ and uttered no ' lamentations^ as is 

 represented in the * Phy tologist,' save and except such as we have 

 just cited." This surely requires no comment, and I would not have 

 dwelt so much upon the subject, except to exhibit it as a characteris- 

 tic specimen of the corrupt spirit of criticism which pervades almost 

 the whole of the long communication. 



At page 336 is the following passage : — " The author complains of 

 the ' finesse held out on every occasion to the disparagement of the 

 Linnaean botany ;' we are afraid that he has, in more than one instance, 

 laid himself open to the charge of doing the same thing in disparage- 

 ment of structural botany. For example, at p. 12, by adroitly foisting 

 a parenthetical sentence into a quotation from the Preface to the 

 ' Introduction to Botany,' he makes Dr. Lindley say that the natural 

 system ' teaches the physician how to discover in every region the 

 medicines that are best adapted for the maladies that prevail in it ;' 

 &c. Now Dr. Lindley is not here speaking of any particular system, 

 but of the science of botany generally, independently of systems and 

 methods." 



No ; Dr. Lindley was not speaking of botany generally, but of 

 " botany as now understood," and of its " furnishing a certain clue " 

 by which to distinguish the medical properties of plants, which no 

 other system than the natural, I believe, ever pretended to do. 



I will only notice once passage more, in which I am, by this inge- 

 nious writer, all but stigmatized as being the fabricator of a deliber- 

 ate falsehood. " By the way," he says, at p. 336, " we may mention 

 that we are entirely unacquainted with any place ' near London,' or 



