Prelude 
very exceptional opportunities of observation. 
But, unlike most other sciences, there are two 
distinct lines of procedure in this, two sides to 
it: the indoor and the outdoor—the purely 
scientific and the popular—school and field or- 
nithology. ‘The one is technical and anatom- 
ical, the dead data—rather dry, as some would 
count dryness; the other has to do with the 
bird’s life-history—coloration, habits, and song 
—with all the associations of the most de- 
lightful surroundings in nature: leading one 
away from the haunts of worriment or business 
into the quiet places where, as Spenser says, 
‘* The merry lark her matins sings aloft ; 
The thrush replies ; the mavis descant plays ; 
The ousel shrills ; the redbreast warbles soft.” 
This distinction between the two lines of 
study finds a literal illustration in the difference 
between school and field botany ; still better, 
however, in the contrast between medical and 
field botany: the latter associated with all the 
exhilaration of search and discovery, of moun- 
tain air and woodland ramble, of the fascina- 
tion of Nature’s society and solitude. Medical 
botany has all the rigid formalism of economic- 
root-and-herb analysis of the laboratory; deal- 
5 
