206 THROUGH GLADE AND MEAD. 
that such study was eminently unpractical, and that the 
time would be better spent in some more useful occu- 
pation. But every child must learn these things in the 
early part of his school career, and then he gets some 
insight into the realm of knowledge that lies beyond 
this open door. How far he will enter in, and how 
widely he will roam over the Elysian Fields of learning 
afterwards, depends largely on his own character and 
opportunities. 
It is so with Natural History studies. To acquire 
the names of plants or animals or minerals, without any 
idea of their mutual relations, may appear trifling; but 
to trace the connections and the relations of the various 
parts of any one of the three great kingdoms of Nature 
is a pursuit adapted to the highest intellect. What 
Cicero said of the study of philosophy may be said 
with equal truth of these studies: ‘They nourish youth, 
they delight old age.” 
The history of botany, like that of any other 
branch of knowledge, is a history of progress from 
small beginnings. It is a history of theories adopted 
as satisfactory for the time being and then discarded, 
of “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” 
of an old order changing and yielding place to new. 
The progress of geographical knowledge, the utility 
of which every one will admit, may be taken as a type 
of the change which the natural sciences have under- 
