Art Out-of-Doors 
he would have trusted this, he would have 
felt that one may learn more quickly, more 
accurately, from print than from conversa- 
tion, if he had ever examined the right kind 
of books ; for in their pages not only the 
name of his plant but its character, its 
affinities, its life-history, would at once have 
been spread before him. 
A careless reader may be deluded by Jef- 
feries’s book into thinking that, as he en- 
joyed so deeply and described so Avell, ig- 
norance must be a blessing. But a more 
careful reader will trace in every page the 
record of a mutilation of pleasure, a limit- 
ing of intelligence, a loss of golden oppor- 
tunities, due simply to a lack of elementary 
scientific knowledge. Jefferies has left us a 
delightful series of books about Nature ; 
had he studied a little botany they would 
have been twice as delightful to us, and he 
would have got thrice as much delight as he 
did get from their making. He was always 
in some puzzle which he could not read — 
some “openly hidden” puzzle which the 
simplest book on botany would have read 
for him. His naive confession of the fact 
342 
