38 A TOUE ROUND MY GARDEN. 



■with regard to everything they come near. They render 

 everything -wearisome, dry, stiff, and pretentious. 



They cannot leave flowers alone — they put them in starch. 

 See a savant enter a smiling meadow or a perfumed, blooming 

 garden; listen to him: you would take a disgust for both 

 meadow and garden. 



They began by forming for those graceful things called 

 flowers, three barbarous languages, which they afterwards 

 mixed, in order to compound one still more barbarous ; then 

 every savant brought his little contributions of new bar- 

 barisms, as was done among the ancients to those heaps of 

 stones placed by the road-sides, to which every traveller was 

 obliged to add a pebble at least. 



I was about to write, at hazard, such of the words of this 

 language made by these gentlemen as occur, to me. But 

 you would not only say, is it not sad work to see flowers 

 thus treated, that festival of the sight, as the ancient Greeks 

 caUed them. But I am sure you would not read two lines 

 of them; therefore, I will let you off with half-a-dozen — 

 Mesocarps, quinqueloculars, infundibuliform, squammiflora, 

 guttiferas, monocotyledons, &c. <fcc. &c. * 



Have you enough? You will never make a botanist; 

 you would have to store your memory with an endless no- 

 menclature like the above, with the satisfaction of knowing 

 that the learned are adding to it daily, and that when 

 acquired you had not gained the name of a single flower. 



As to the names of flowers, look, at the foot of that wall, 

 at these bunches of mignonette, or reseda. Linnaeus, who 

 fully played his part in the barbarisms, but who considered 

 flowers in a friendly light, and who, of all savants, has least 

 ill-treated them — Linnaeus said that the odour of the reseda 

 was ambrosia. Contemplate while you can its green and 

 fawn-coloured spikes, inhale its sweet odour ; for here comes 

 a savant — there comes another — the reseda is about to be 

 transformed! In the first place, there is no such thing as 

 odour. Botanists do not admit of odour. For them, odour 

 signifies nothing, nothing more than colour does. 



Colour and odour are two luxuries; two superfluities of 

 which the learned have deprived flowers. 



♦ In the original, more than a page is filled with botanical terms.— £d. 



