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 list 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 feeling 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 
