387 



now inclined to think that we lost a very fine mass of H. Tunbridgense 

 we had growing under glass, fi'om having kept it too constantly wet. 



W. Bennett. 



Brockham Lodge, Nov 7, 1851. 



Professor Nees von Esenheck. 



The political reaction now in full swing on the Continent is not to 

 pass away without selecting some victims from the ranks of the repre- 

 sentatives of botanical science, as it has done from those of other 

 branches of learning. M. Nees von Esenbeck, for having expressed 

 too freely, it was thought, his political conviction, has been deprived 

 of his situation as Professor in the University of Breslau, and is now 

 reduced to the painful necessity of disposing of both his library and 

 herbarium. British naturalists may wonder how scientific men abroad 

 can be so senseless as to join in political demonstrations, and may be 

 at a loss to account for the fact, that a sober man like Stephen End- 

 licher could be so sanguine as to take the regalia of the Old Germanic 

 Empire from the Museum of Vienna to the revolutionary Parliament 

 in Frankfort. They may have thought that that savan would have 

 acted more rationally if, instead of heading political deputations, he 

 had finished the Supplements to his ' Genera Plantarum,' or quietly 

 pursued those philological studies by which, no less than by his 

 labours in other branches of learning, he had obtained a well-merited 

 celebrity. Perhaps it would have been wiser had he followed the 

 latter course ; but we must not forget that, in the present slate of the 

 Continent, it is difficult to observe neutrality, and that men of science, 

 from their superior education, feel too keenly the despotic yoke op- 

 pressing their nation to remain indifferent spectators. Who knows, 

 if England did not possess the liberties it does, .whether some of our 

 learned might not be induced to play the same parts which some of 

 them now censure in their colleagues across the water ? 



We must therefore deal lightly with M. Nees von Esenbeck for 

 committing the blunder, if blunder it is, of mixing in politics, and 

 merely keep in view the botanist who, by his learning, erudition, and 

 sound philosophical reasoning, has elucidated the most perplexing of 

 natural orders, and whose literary career has been a succession of 

 brilliant achievements and important discoveries, making it the more 

 painful that the labours of such a man should be cut short by the sale 



