146 Chapters in Modern Botany CHAP. 



that however useful and truly botanical its matter, the 

 arrangement and presentment of your text-book is not that 

 of either botanist or nature at all, but is directly and 

 historically (however unconsciously) derived from that 

 traditional discipline of grammar and analysis which in 

 the name of literature have been crushing out the love 

 of literature, even the knowledge of literature, in every 

 university and school of Europe for centuries, and from 

 which we are now only beginning to escape. Its list of 

 dramatis persona will be constantly useful for reference ; 

 its dictionary may help from time to time as well ; its 

 grammar of the science may be discussed later. Let the 

 evolutionary way of looking at things become gradually 

 familiar, then habitual, at last instinctive ; then you may 

 profitably consider the best way of arrangement of your 

 ideas in fact, make your scientific grammar for yourself. 

 But this will be in sharpest contrast to the old one, no 

 longer fixed or static, but historical, kinetic ; rational 

 therefore, not merely empirical, synthetic instead of analytic 

 in spirit and result. And when you endeavour to make the 

 unending stream of things intelligible by the artifice of 

 viewing it in section as it were, as momentarily frozen and 

 photographed at this or that point upon its course, you will 

 sympathetically interpret and profitably absorb the pre- 

 evolutionary method, which has, of course, been doing this 

 all the while. In plainer language, instead of being (as the 

 established programmes have it) an anatomist first, dis- 

 secting a dead " type," a physiologist afterwards making 

 its parts work, and an evolutionist by getting up Darwin's 

 theory as an external body of dogma last of all, the right 

 course is precisely the opposite : Darwin's habit of observa- 

 tion and interpretation first, physiological details afterwards, 

 with such anatomy as is wanted to explain them. There- 

 after, of course, such pure morphology as you will. 



