NATURE AND BOOKS. 25 
most important, supplies you with the ethical feeling, 
the ideal aspiration to be identified with each particular 
flower. One moderately thick volume would probably 
suffice for such a modest round as this. 
Lo! now the labour of Hercules when he set about 
bringing up Cerberus from below, and all the work done 
by Apollo in the years when he ground corn, are but 
a little matter compared with the attempt to master 
botany. Great minds have been at it these two thousand 
years, and yet we are still only nibbling at the edge of 
the leaf, as the ploughboys bite the young hawthorn in 
spring. The mere classification—all plant-lore was a 
vast chaos till there came the man of Sweden, the great 
Linnzus, till the sexes were recognised, and everything 
was ruled out and set in place again. A wonderful 
man! I think it would be true to say it was Linnzus 
who set the world on its present twist of thinking, and 
levered our mental globe a little more perpendicular to 
the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and 
took it to bits like a scientific child; he touched nature 
with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window 
—perhaps the first man who had ever done so for 
seventeen hundred years or so, since superstition blighted 
the progress of pagan Rome. The work he did! But 
no one reads Linnzus now; the folios, indeed, might 
moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got 
into the minds of men, and the text is of little conse- 
quence. The best book he wrote to read now is the 
delightful ‘Tour in Lapland,’ with its quaint pen-and-ink 
sketches, so realistically vivid, as if the thing sketched 
had been banged on the paper and so left its impress. 
I have read it three times. and I still cherish the old 
yellow pages; it is the best botanical book, written by 
the greatest of botanists, specially sent on a botanical 
