58 THE HABIT OF HOLLIES 



VIII 



The task which Mr. G. F. Scott Elliot has undertaken 

 The nabit in his excellent little manual, Nature Studies, 

 of Hollies i s a praiseworthy one. It is an attempt to 

 condense the botanical lore of which he is so competent 

 a master, and to present it to his readers stripped 

 of that deterrent envelope of technical phraseology 

 wherein such lore is usually entombed. That he 

 has only partially succeeded is no fault of Mr. Elliot. 

 Any language in colloquial use most of all one like 

 English, in world-wide use must be deficient in that 

 rigid precision which is one of the postulates of scientific 

 discourse : 



'That I have been obliged to say chlorophyll instead of "leaf- 

 green," or cambium instead of " building-ring," is not my fault. 

 These terms have been fastened on the English language, and 

 it would be hypercritical to displace them. I have gone as 

 far as I dared, not as far as I would like, in the direction of 

 suppression.' 



In truth, one cannot go very far in that direction 

 without encountering ambiguity. Scientific phraseology 

 is not a luxury or a vanity nomenclature and classi- 

 fication must be expressed in a dead language one 

 that has passed beyond all change. Consider an instance 

 in ornithology. Among all English bird-names perhaps 

 there is not one that conveys to us islanders such a 

 familiar image as that of 'robin.' Even town-bred 

 children, for whom the greenwood, alas ! is too often an 

 unmeaning phrase, recognise in that title the little red- 



