40 January — Use of Scientific Knowledge. 



detail, and he may well desire this without abandoning 

 his pictorial purposes and intentions, then it is most 

 convenient for him to know the plants scientifically. I 

 cannot think that the Englishman in M. Deschanel's 

 book was wrong even in using a microscope, though 

 the idea conveyed is that he did so in order to be able 

 to delineate microscopically. There is an obvious non- 

 sequitur here. It does not follow that because an artist 

 happens to use a microscope to dissect some plant in 

 order that he may afterwards remember it, he will neces- 

 sarily draw the plant otherwise than as it simply appears 

 to the naked eye — to the educated eye — in its sub- 

 ordinate place in Nature. Possibly M. Deschanel might 

 argue that the landscape-painter need not trouble him- 

 self even about the names of plants, since he does not 

 write their names upon his canvas, and no doubt these 

 plants have existed for innumerable generations before 

 any nomenclature was contrived for them ; still he may 

 surely avail himself of what is nothing more than a con- 

 venient memoria technical all ready to his hand. The 

 objection does not seem to be so much to the knowledge 

 of a little botany, as to the habit of drawijig plants 

 minutely in isolation ; and this habit is not injurious for 

 the knowledge which it conveys, but because it en- 

 courages us to neglect the more important truths of re- 

 lation, and makes us think we have done something 

 good and useful, when, in fact, we are busy in an occu- 

 pation which is not fine art, and which is incomparably 

 easier than fine art. Any young student whose eye for 

 form has attained a tolerable degree of accuracy may 



