368 BOTANY : ITS POSITION AND PROSPECTS 
absorb and transcend the results of observation over lesser 
areas, with their comparatively clear demarcation of species. 
From such broad surveys came the gradual conviction that 
systematic botany was at once too artificial and too sectional to 
represent truly its professed ideal of natural grouping, being 
rigid and definite where nature proved to be plastic and variable. 
Only after dealing with thousands of specimens in the collec- 
tions which passed under his scrutiny could he exclaim * more 
specimens always break down characters,' i.e. destroy the 
rigidity of botanical definition and extend the fringe of in- 
dividual variabihty. It began to grow clear that over a 
sufficiently large range every variety might exist between 
two alhed species, and that where these intermediate forms 
had not chanced to be exterminated so as to leave the extreme 
forms in isolated contrast, it was impossible to lay down where 
the one ' species ' ended and the other began. 
But this upset the doctrines everywhere taught. Hooker, 
reahsing as no other botanist the difficulties involved and their 
reaction upon his science, divined in them one secret of the 
ineffectiveness he deplored in systematic botany. System, 
he saw, broke down at its widest extension. Unknown to 
its expositors, it had become formalised and abstract ; it 
awaited a new interpretation to revive its powers. 
Meantime, the same abstract formahsm had invaded the 
lecture -rooms. All that could be done for the regeneration 
of botany was to improve the teaching of it, first, as has been 
seen, by setting examination papers which demanded a traming 
not in simple memory, but in thought and observation ; then 
by aiding in the preparation of the right kind of books for 
students and the right kind of lectures, in new organisation 
at the Universities and in the pubhcations of the learned 
societies. His hopes take shape in a letter written to Huxley 
in the earlier part of 1856 : 
My own impression is that we shall make no great advance 
in teaching Nat. Science in this country, except by some 
joint effort of Botanists and Zoologists who should pave the 
way by propounding a strictly scientific elementary system, 
— ^were this once effected we have sufficient command 
