220 A GARDEN DIARY 
For those who, like myself, are the mere irre- 
sponsible camp-followers of science, the import- 
ance of any given solution seems often to be 
less in what it actually teaches us, than in what 
it allows us indirectly to guess at. The new fact 
may or may not be important, but the ideas that 
it starts in our minds can hardly fail to be so. 
In the imaginative realm there is literally no limit 
to the revelations to which the tiniest of natural 
phenomena may not serve as an introduction. 
The fact itself may be the minutest of facts; a 
mere pin-point, a scarce perceptible chink of light, 
but it is a chink in the walls as it were of a great 
cathedral of discovery, the doors of which may, 
for anything one knows to the contrary, be 
thrown widely open to oneself, and to everyone 
else to-morrow. 
This, if I am not misleading myself, is the real 
attractiveness of every pursuit which has the 
elucidation of Nature for its end and aim; one 
perhaps most felt, or at all events most enjoyed, 
by the more ignorant of her votaries. Properly 
directed ignorance is in truth a most desirable 
haze, and when some stray beam does traverse 
its obscurity, how great is the illumination which 
follows! What may not be possible where there 
is no dead-weight of fact to keep our feet upon 
the solid earth; no panoply of unescapable 
knowledge to bid our pleasant fancies nay? 
Even for those less comfortably unfettered 
