RUSKIN'S PROSERPINA. 201 



mately perfect, all known plants will be properly figured, so 

 that nobody need describe them, and unknown plants will be 

 so rare that nobody will care to learn a new and difficult 

 language in order to give an account of what in all probability 

 he will never see." 



Well, for that matter, the English Botany, in its various 

 editions, furnishes fairly good figures of all British plants ; 

 and the " Botanical Magazine " — a page of an early number 

 of which, eighty years old, is gibbeted by Mr. Kuskin — has 

 gone on to figure more than 6000 cultivated exotics, and is 

 continuing at the rate of nearly a hundred a year ; so that 

 our author's ideal is practically all but realized already. 

 There are wellnigh pictures enough, if one knows how and 

 where to find them. And it amusingly appears, from Mr. 

 Kuskin's trouble with St. Bruno's Lily at the beginning, and 

 from his investigation of moss further on, as well as from 

 scattered statements, that his mode of proceeding in syste- 

 matic botany is the simple one of searching high and low for 

 a picture to match the specimen in hand. Accordingly, it is 

 not surprising that his " botanical studies were, when [he] 

 had attained the age of fifty, no further advanced than the 

 reader will find them in the opening chapter of this book.'* 



As to this, the conclusions which the reader will draw are 

 all along anticipated by the author. Next to the pervading — 

 well — bumptiousness, nothing is so prominent in the book as 

 the profession, not to say the parade, of ignorance of the topics 

 treated. As to " the elements of the science of botany," " I 

 can scarcely say that I have j^et any tenure of it myself." 

 " And, meanwhile I don't know very clearly so much as what 

 a root is or what a leaf is." " Some one said of me once, very 

 shrewdly. When he wants to work out a subject, he writes a 

 book on it. . . . This book will be nothing but processes. I 

 don't mean to assert anything positively in it, from tlie first 

 page to the last. Whatever I say is to be understood only as 

 a conditional statement — liable to and inviting correction. 

 And this the more because, as on the whole I am at war with 

 the botanists, I can't ask them to help me, and then call them 

 names afterwards." So " for many reasons, I am forced to 



