SCIENCE-CULTURE FOR THE MASSES. 33 



feel how real are the interests, and how wondrously exact in 

 their relations are all the harmonies, of a scientific system. 



The science of some, I know, is that involved in the idea 

 of Wordsworth's Peter Bell, whose observation of Nature, as 

 we all know, resulted in the dogma that 



" A primrose by the river's brim, 

 A yellow primrose was to him 

 And it was nothing more." 



As Huxley has remarked, it would not have roused Peter 

 a whit from his apathy had he been informed that " the 

 primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous 

 corolla and a central placentation." Whilst if the botanist 

 continued his encyclopaedic chant, he might afford Peter the 

 additional satisfaction of knowing that the flower belongs to 

 the natural order Primulaceae ; that it has oblanceolate, 

 wrinkled, radical leaves; an inferior, gamosepalous calyx; 

 pentandrous stamens ; and a syncarpous, superior pistil ! 

 As an actual and not merely supposititious criticism upon 

 this mode of regarding scientific method, I may quote a 

 newspaper paragraph, now of some years' date, which 

 says : " In the Charterhouse examination questions for this 

 year, under the head of botany, the scholar is told to 

 explain the following terms : Malva has a gamosepalous 

 calyx ; a polypetalous hypogynous corolla ; polyandrous, 

 monadelphous, epipetalous stamens; and a superior, 

 syncarpous pistil." The reporter adds no observation upon 

 the information he gives his readers ; but if we may judge 

 from his silence, the Charterhouse boys had his utmost 

 sympathy and commiseration in their hard estate. 



Now all this, I frankly admit, sounds ludicrously enig- 

 matic, and affords a text whereon a sophist might inveigh 

 against the abstruse nature of science and its terminology. 

 But to teach botany merely as a modernised repository of 

 classical roots and derivations, is not the aim or intention of 

 the true botanist. His technical language is as necessary 

 and as useful to him as are the privileged terms of any trade 



D 



