NATURE AND BOOKS. 25 



most important, supplies you with the ethical feeling, 

 the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular 

 flower. One moderately thick volume would probably 

 suffice for such a modest round as this. 



Lo ! now the labour of Hercules when he set about 

 bringing up Cerberus from below, and all the work done 

 by Apollo in the years when he ground corn, arc but 

 a little matter compared with the attempt to master 

 botany. Great minds have been at it these two thousand 

 years, and yet we are still only nibbling at the edge of 

 the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the young hawthorn in 

 spring. The mere classification- all plant-lore was a 

 vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great 

 Linnaeus, till the sexes were recognised, and everything 

 was ruled out and set in place again. A wonderful 

 man ! I think it would be true to say it was Linnaeus 

 who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and 

 levered our mental globe a little more perpendicular to 

 the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and 

 took it to bits like a scientific child ; he touched nature 

 with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window 

 perhaps the first man who had ever done so for 

 seventeen hundred years or so, since superstition blighted 

 the progress of pagan Rome. The work he did ! But 

 no one reads Linnaeus now ; the folios, indeed, might 

 moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got 

 into the minds of men, and the text is of little conse- 

 quence. The best book he wrote to read now is the 

 delightful ' Tour in Lapland,' with its quaint pen-and-ink 

 sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched 

 had been banged on the paper and so left its impress. 

 I have read it three times, and I still cherish the old 

 yellow pages ; it is the best botanical book, written by 

 the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical 



