Natural History, G3 



entirely changed the prospects of every tropical country in 

 the world. 



But our British Botany is, for the most part, quite unin- 

 telligible except to the highly trained specialist, and its lack 

 of influence on the practical side is a very serious matter. One 

 has only to read the nonsense commonly written about the 

 land question to see that this is so. 



There is, of course, a convenience in avoiding the criti- 

 cism, often brutal and unsympathetic, of the practical expert. 

 But if any discovery is to be of real use to the world, for God's 

 sake let it be told in the plainest of Anglo-Saxon, and let it 

 struggle for its life with the bayonets and maxims of the most 

 Bulgarian criticism. 



That is the only safe course. It is no new thing for wise 

 men to withdraw into esoteric languages and to live uncon- 

 taminated by contact with the man of affairs. But the result 

 has been that their discoveries have been lost and their lives 

 have been of no use either to the world or to Science. 



Vet though over-specialism and word-mongering is a real 

 danger, there are many hopeful signs in the Natural Sciences 

 to-day. 



In the '70's and *8o's a certain ineffable superiority and a 

 crude materialism (not essentially different from that of 

 Lucretius) was openly professed even by some eminent men. 

 Nowadays such opinions cannot be supported by scientific 

 evidence. Radio-activity and vortex atoms have prevented 

 any orthodox belief in the essential materialism of matter. 

 There is no gross solidity to-day anywhere, not even in the 

 atom. 



The truth is that, provided your knowledge of a subject 

 is confined to a shilling text-book, or even to the hand-book 

 published at i8s nett, all problems may appear solved or 

 soluble by scientific methods. 



Step outside the text-book and go to the originals, or 

 ask questions and experiment ever so slightly by yourself, 

 you will find that difficulties, mysteries, and insoluble problems 

 crowd upon you. 



Suppose one had an expectation of a life of 969 years, and 

 could read, with profit, in that time every volume on the forty- 



