A Word for Books 



But there will be a further gain. Once 

 let a person begin to study plants and he will 

 desire to increase the hst of his acquaint- 

 ances and then he will use his eyes as he 

 never did before. He will discover many 

 beautiful plants of whose existence in his 

 neighborhood he had never dreamed. He 

 will see a hundred things where before he 

 had seen ten. Having learned to value the 

 beauty which is small in scale, he will seek 

 for it instead of waiting for it to strike his 

 eye, and will find it in the most unpromising 

 places. He will delight in the infinitesimal 

 blossoms on the door-weed where the passive, 

 unawakened eye discovers no blossoms at all; 

 and the flowers of the pig-weed, even, de- 

 spised of the multitude, will be to him a 

 treasury of interest. Nor, surely, will his 

 new appreciation of humble charms like 

 these lessen his feehng for the splendor of 

 the iris he finds in the swamp, or of the 

 turk's-cap-lily that flaunts by the wayside. 



Great devotion to scientific study does, 

 indeed, occasionally seem to kill the aes- 

 thetic sense. But this is not because science 

 and a love of beauty are necessarily at vari- 



337 



