BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1347 



intoxicating ecstasy of Archimedes one has seen renewed in a 

 physicist discoverer still fertile to-day. Nor need there even be 

 discovery: the landscapes and the simple details of life by turns 

 were thus ever rousing Haeckel into outbursts of eloquent appre- 

 ciation as we rambled the Jena hillsides with him; and every field- 

 naturalist worth the name has felt the like, and from moments of 

 childhood to old age. 



The fault thus lies essentially in method, say rather in mode of 

 presentation — ^far too long, as a rule; and even nowadays too 

 commonly the "rule" comes first, the examples and exceptions 

 later; so the life, that makes literature as well as science, is thus 

 reached only by the few in whom it is too strong to be thus killed. 

 All this especially since the decline of Hellenic culture into Hel- 

 lenistic, so with Roman slave-pedagogue as its outcome; and the 

 like too since — and with — the decline of the Renaissance, which it 

 at once expressed and advanced, in vicious circles even to recent 

 and even too many contemporary ones. In fact, above all since the 

 fear and disgrace of failing in examinations came in to replace mere 

 physical punishment ; and so to drive sensitive young spirits towards 

 nervous exhaustion or breakdown — and indeed in Germany before 

 the War too often even to suicide ; and far of tener condemning girls 

 towards that comparative sterility which is so lamentably inflicted 

 among the women thus "educated" in so many countries to this 

 day. For in the great days of "the New Learning", the new geo- 

 graphy and astronomy also, all these ideas were aflame, each full 

 of fire and light; and even when grammar was being worked out, 

 we see its glow and gleam irradiating "The Grammarian's Funeral"; 

 though that scene is also Browning's most significantly chosen of 

 historic symbols. For as the supply of fresh fuel to freshen these 

 fires of thought abated, the scholars came to pick up trifles, to 

 scrape among embers; since which school-ushers and pupils have 

 too much gone on sitting around the ashes of aU these; so in the 

 cold and dark. 



Passing from this imagery to the conditions it expresses, what 

 better example than those too long afforded by the teaching of the 

 biological sciences? That "dryness of botany", which still too much 

 repels children and women who love flowers, and even gardeners 

 who tend them, is soon dispelled by the botanist whose love and 

 tending have kept him child, woman and gardener in one, albeit 

 encyclopedist too ; and when he teaches in that order, with feeling, 

 interest and experience, they cannot but soon desire more of his 

 knowledge too. Yet botany is still mainly associated in the popular 

 mind with our Latin names of species and these without under- 

 standing of their international code-value; and beyond this their 

 nature-wide order and its significance. 



Yet when we teach botany in fields and garden, and interest our 



