EVOLUTION THEORIES 225 



More generally, in character and experience 

 he was a Jura peasant, with all the French 

 peasant's tenacious and tireless industry, 

 his manifold minute economies. One rare 

 advantage he had, and this it was which 

 made him the world's master-peasant — the 

 daintiest ultra-feminine eye for dirt, and as 

 its direct and woman-like application a 

 super-housewifely passion for cleaning. How, 

 out of these simple conditions, these homely 

 and humble antecedents, came discoveries 

 and applications revolutionizing industries, 

 agriculture, medicine, and through Lister 

 surgery (for Lister is Pasteur's tar-boy), 

 we have tried to tell elsewhere. 



So, again, the botanist is in the university 

 as the representative of the old herbalist, the 

 wise woman gathering her simples. Lin- 

 naeus, with his world-museum, his proudly 

 entitled "System of Nature," albeit traveller 

 and scholar, is essentially and traditionally 

 a head-pharmacist, the most orderly on 

 record of that necessarily tidiest and most 

 careful of guilds. Jussieu, of the natural 

 system which replaced the pharmacists' 

 inevitably more artificial one, was the king's 

 gardener, the man of living flowers, charged 

 to keep the queen and her ladies in bouquets, 

 and so getting a free hand to vary them, and 

 an intelligent and questioning audience 



