144 Chapters in Modern Botany CHAP. 



set with primroses in crowded constellation ; and how the 

 deep summer sky shows first in sheets of hyacinth. Soon 

 comes high tide of leaves in June : the full-robed year is 

 crowned and garlanded with exuberant blossom, to which 

 July brings the strongest chords of colour. Yet already 

 the tide has turned, the flowers are withering or fading, but 

 a new profusion of fruits, more strangely varied even than 

 the flowers, is rising in their place. These, too, ripen and 

 pass, and the seeds, each a young life, find, ofttimes through 

 strange adventure, their resting-place and sleep. The 

 shivering leaves surrender their life to the branches which 

 have borne them, and fall away, often strangely transfigured 

 in dying ; only their tiny nurslings the buds remain, warmly 

 wrapped away within their protecting sheaths. Life has 

 ebbed out of sight ; Proserpina is in Hades, and sky and 

 mother earth must mourn till her release. 



Mode of Study in Botany. Here then is the common 

 theme not only of poets old and new, of painters, but of 

 naturalists. Each, indeed, has his own way of treating 

 this ; and each way involves its special difficulties, its risks 

 of error. For the poet and the painter the detailed exacti- 

 tude are of subordinate importance, hence both have often 

 fallen into mere echoes and conventions : the town poet 

 in parrot whine of Proserpine without one true glimpse of 

 her yearly Paradise or Hades ; the painter (as if confined 

 to the latter) with his " brown tree." For the botanist the 

 danger has been a different one. As his herborisations 

 have needs become keener and of more minute research, 

 his herbarium labours more vast and detailed, his laboratory 

 and microscope more engrossing and their new problems 

 more intricate, his library, too, more incredibly voluminous, 

 even his greenhouses better filled, his real intimacy with 

 living nature as a whole has often diminished rather than 

 increased ; until he writes manuals and treatises excellent 



