220 A GARDEN DIARY 



For those who, like myself, are the mere irre- 

 sponsible camp-followers of science, the import- 

 ance of any given solution seems often to be 

 less in what it actually teaches us, than in what 

 it allows us indirectly to guess at. The new fact 

 may or may not be important, but the ideas that 

 it starts in our minds can hardly fail to be so. 

 In the imaginative realm there is literally no limit 

 to the revelations to which the tiniest of natural 

 phenomena may not serve as an introduction. 

 The fact itself may be the minutest of facts ; a 

 mere pin-point, a scarce perceptible chink of light, 

 but it is a chink in the walls as it were of a great 

 cathedral of discovery, the doors of which may, 

 for anything one knows to the contrary, be 

 thrown widely open to oneself, and to everyone 

 else to-morrow. 



This, if I am not misleading myself, is the real 

 attractiveness of every pursuit which has the 

 elucidation of Nature for its end and aim ; one 

 perhaps most felt, or at all events most enjoyed, 

 by the more ignorant of her votaries. Properly 

 directed ignorance is in truth a most desirable 

 haze, and when some stray beam does traverse 

 its obscurity, how great is the illumination which 

 follows ! What may not be possible where there 

 is no dead-weight of fact to keep our feet upon 

 the solid earth ; no panoply of unescapable 

 knowledge to bid our pleasant fancies nay ? 



Even for those less comfortably unfettered 



