208 PHYSIOLOGICAL BOTANY. 



French, and Italians, even at present, are but little ac- 

 quainted with our labours in the Natural sciences. We, 

 with whom it is part of the education of youth to learn 

 the languages of these nations, more readily become ac- 

 quainted with the labours of other nations than they do 

 with ours, because our language is much too difficult to 

 be learned by these nations. Hitherto the Russians, in 

 their writings on these sciences, have generally made use 

 of Latin, French, and German ; but if they were to begin 

 to write in their own languages, and simultaneously to 

 make great progress in the sciences, we must then either 

 remain in ignorance of their works or learn their lan- 

 guage. But Schleiden condemns learning from books, 

 and in his opinion it is of no consequence whether we 

 are acquainted with what has been observed by foreigners 

 or not. He says, in the same preface, " True formative 

 knowledge, that which expands the nobler powers of the 

 human mind, can at the most be acquired in and with 

 the assistance of books, but never from books. Learning 

 from books is the secret and unsuspected source from 

 which the disingenuousness and tendency to dissimula- 

 tion is first nourished, and which poisons the present age : 

 accustoms us from youth upwards neither to say, to 

 think, or to do anything of ourselves, but merely to fill 

 our meagre and sterile minds with ideas which have been 

 borrowed and handed down from other sources, so as to 

 palm off this abundance as healthy knowledge/' He 

 frequently repeats that he has striven to be peculiar and 

 original. In the same preface he says, " I had endea- 

 voured at once, and without any regard to what had 

 already been done, but furnished with all the expedients 

 at our command in the present day, to rediscover the 

 whole science from the direct investigation of nature; 

 thus my work acquired an originality, which, independ- 

 ently of its correctness, always possesses something more 

 attractive than the matter when arranged in an historical 

 and philological form." The author somewhat deceives 

 himself. Where there is a noise, there flock boys and 



