ii INTRODUCTION 



botanist is a dry-as-dust gentleman, after the pattern of the meagre 

 philomath in Miss Kendall's Dreams to Sell, who saw in Nature a soulless 

 something, without beauty and without sentiment: 



He loved peculiar plants and rare 

 For any plant he did not care 



That he had seen before : 

 Primroses by the river's brim 

 Dicotyledons were to him, 



And they were nothing more. 



Photo by] 



j. 3. LICHENS ON AN OLD WALL. 



Step. 



Lichens are independent of the soil, and obtain their nutriment entirely from the air. They therefore 

 grow upon bare rocks, tree bark, and walls, drying up in the summer but reviving in the autumn. 



Professor Dawson is, we believe, responsible for the saying : " I hate 

 Theology and Botany, but I love religion and flowers" ; and if by the term 

 Botany the professor meant only those dry-as-dust expositions of the science 

 which some of us know so well, then we are quite at one with him. But it 

 would seem that the professor's antipathy is to the science itself, as opposed 

 to the more aesthetic study of Nature : and here his laconicism may prove 

 misleading. " You study Nature in the house " (i.e. in dried specimens), 

 wrote Professor Agassiz, " and when you go out of doors you cannot find 

 her " suggestive words, that unlock the secret of many a wearying failure. 



Dr. Lindley well observes on this point : " Only to apply their names to 



