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only with scientific truth based on scrupulous investigation 

 and rigorous induction. In producing and cultivating this 

 scientific spirit and these scientific habits of study, his pet 

 subject, Botany, is capable of doing admirable service, above 

 many others, from its remarkable exactness of characteristics 

 and classification and its unusually copious and precise 

 nomenclature. Its educative value in this respect should 

 be more realised in the training of our children, being 

 combined as it is with the physical exercise, the inter- 

 course with nature, practical work in the field, and orderly 

 neat-handedness which its real study gives its students 

 all which, and much more, it richly did for John Duncan. 



Duncan avoided one great danger connected with such 

 physical studies the narrowing, purely intellectual ten- 

 dencies they are apt to engender. He wisely co-ordinated 

 them with wider social and religious subjects possessing 

 humanitarian relations. He also constantly sought to make 

 his studies serviceable in daily life, as when he utilised 

 Astronomy in dial-making, and Botany in the cure of 

 disease ; for this practical side of John's intellectual work 

 was a marked characteristic that pervaded all he did. 

 Moreover, these broader moral inquiries, combining with 

 his investigation into the plants and stars, gave him views 

 of the philosophy of things, and an insight into the wonders 

 and beauties of nature greatly hidden from the mere 

 narrow physicist, which he would otherwise have lost and 

 to which he frequently gave expression, in his higher 

 moments, to intimate friends. On these occasions, he 

 became impressive and uttered himself in unwonted strains 

 of philosophy, such as found vent on his death-bed a little 

 before the close, when exhorting John Taylor to the earnest 



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