PASSIONAL BOTANY AND MEDICAL ALGEBRA. 341 
come from Naples and Stockholm, perhaps still farther, to hear 
me ; and yet it may be well conceived that to teach passional bot- 
any is not among the gifts of men, and the interpretation of the 
language of flowers requires an imagination more subtle and deli- 
cate than ours. In Herschel and Jupiter, the courses of botany 
are professed by young vestals of eighteen to twenty years, desig- 
nated for this employment by unequalled charms of elocution and 
of beauty. 
When I say eighteen or twenty years, I speak the language of 
the earth, since the years of Jupiter are twelve times longer than 
ours, and the vestalate begins only toward the hundredth year. 
We should also be very much deceived if we supposed that the 
science of flowers is only a science of pleasure ; all the passional 
sciences are compound sciences, always connecting the useful with 
the agreeable. For example, one of the most interesting branches 
of passional botany, is that which is called medical algebra. This 
is the art of discovering the infallible specific for diseases, by the 
simple inspection of the character or of the passional dominant of 
a flower. I have not defiled my youth in dissecting corpses ; I 
have nobly spent it in loving ; and yet I would not give more than 
a month to medical algebra, without attaining the discovery of 
wonderful secrets of pharmacy. It is my formal will, not to die 
this time, before leaving to the canine race a testimony of my es- 
teem and affection, a certain specific against hydrophobia. Med- 
ical algebra explains a priori, why the juice of the pomegranate 
tree should be fatal to the tape-worm ; for the tape-worm, that 
filthy and parasitical reptile, that lives on the purest blood of man, 
is the emblem of parasitical commerce, which lives on the purest 
substance of the social labor ; and the pomegranate symbolizes the 
apostle of the principle of solidarity and fraternal association, which 
must kill traffic. 
Thus doth the keen analogist behold 
Before him Nature’s mystic book unrolled, 
Already fit to deck his shining throne, 
The leaves are opened, and the roses blown. — Wallace. 
We may be neither musicians nor painters, and yet tell the rea- 
son of the perfect accord of the two notes, la and mi, and of the 
