1899-19°°.] 553 



for instance Smith's English Flora with Bos well's English 

 Botany, or Wilson's Bryologia with Braithwaite's Moss Flora, 

 or Hookers' Jungermannioe with Pearson's British Hepaticce. 

 The modern works are more complete in detail and minute, 

 but not half so interesting or lifelike. They smell of the lamp 

 and the microscope, not of the fields. 



I hope what I have said will not be misunderstood. It is 

 inevitable in these days that there should be specialists, both 

 among amateurs and professional naturalists. 



Anyone who wants to do any real work of permanent value 

 must specialise to some extent and make himself master of some 

 limited portion of the field, but this may be done, and has been 

 done, along with a good general and practical knowledge of 

 other subjects besides his own. 



One department of Science is correlated with another in the 

 most extraordinary way as we are finding out more and more 

 everyday. It is only when the specialist forgets this and busies 

 himself in his own subject, excluding other interests, that his 

 work suffers, and he himself suffers from his limited view. 

 While for some reason which I cannot quite explain we gain 

 more instruction and learn more about the life of the woods 

 and the fields of lake and river and sea from the best of the 

 older books, no age except the present could have produced 

 such books as YLtxnox^ Plant Life. Although a specialist of no 

 mean order Kerner von Marilaun has devoted many years to 

 the noble task of popularising the history of the life of plants, 

 and without losing interest on the one hand or pandering to 

 popular taste or shallowness he has produced a work artistic 

 instinct with life of entrancing interest. His sympathies are so 

 wide, his illustrations drawn from every source, he seems to feel 

 that the life of plants, connected as it is on every side with that 

 of other races of beings, is an expression of the thought of one 

 creative mind. He gives living interest to the most recondite 

 and abstruse discoveries of modern botany by showing how 

 every detail ministers to the life of the plant. 



I will now sum up before passing on to speak of our work in 



