Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/800

780 of the different kinds of loaves, but gather as many as you can; then, by reference to the book, describe them to yourself in botanical terms, and keep on in this way till you can give a scientific description of any plant you see, without the book. In a few weeks you will find that you have mastered, almost without knowing it, the dreadful bugbear of botanical language, and got a good deal of solid pleasure out of the process to boot.

You are now ready to take up the classification of plants, and to study their habits and relationships—and this is where the real pleasure begins. Don't worry about species at first, but be satisfied for a time with referring the different plants you meet to their appropriate orders and genera; specific distinctions are often perplexing, and can be attended to later. Gray's "Manual" and Chapman's "Southern Flora" are the only hand-books you will need—the latter for Southern Georgia and Florida, the former for more northern latitudes. I have seen Northern amateurs puzzling over Gray in Florida, and wondering that they could find so few of the plants around them described there, never seeming to realize that a manual of the flora of the Northern States would not answer just as well for an almost tropical region.

Florida is a specially interesting region to the botanist on account of the peculiar forms of plant-life to be found there. I wish I had time to introduce the reader to some of my friends of the forest and jungle, though I dare say he will find it more profitable to seek them out for himself. Botanizing in Florida, however, has this drawback: the pine-lands are so poor that, for the most interesting specimens, you must go to the swamps and hummocks, at the risk of getting more malaria than plants, as I can testify to my cost. But in Southern Georgia there is no such danger. The soil of the pine-lands there is richer, and the whole earth becomes, in spring-time, an Eden of beauty and fragrance. There is no need to go into malarious places; you can hardly set your foot down anywhere without treading on flowers. At a place near the railroad, between Albany and Thomasville, I once stood and gathered seventeen different species without moving out of my tracks. The Houstonias, Atamasco lilies, and yellow jasmines, make their appearance in February, and from then on till June the most diligent collector will have had as much as he can do to keep up with the rich succession of plant-life constantly unfolding itself to view.

And, all the while that one is pursuing a delightful study, he is getting abundant exercise in the open air, without the dreary consciousness of exertion for exertion's sake. One can walk for hours on a botanical ramble without fatigue, when twenty minutes of an aimless "constitutional" would send one home fagged out in body and mind. The parlor gymnastics recommended by Mr. Youmans may have their value in some cases, but for myself the most dismal moments I have ever spent were while laboring conscientiously with