Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/679

Rh seeking to solve the puzzle. What is life itself? With such an aim, the science of botany is more than a pleasant recreation for a summer holiday, it is more than a little accomplishment which can be taught in a finishing school for girls, it is even more than the sentimental or the poetic or the artistic contemplation of the beautiful as displayed in the rose and the lily. The botanist is devoting his time, his energy, his ability (if he has any) to the study of plants not because "it must be so lovely to be always studying flowers," as I have heard so often to my great discomfort, but that he may learn something that will help his fellows in their everyday lives, give them some truer notion of the physical life, and reveal to them some of the principles that underlie it all.

This sounds very fine, but how is the botanist doing all this;and what is the evidence that he has even begun to do some of this? The beginning of botany in this country, so far as the white settlers are concerned, was coincident with the first exploring expeditions, when the hardy pioneers made note of the vegetation, whether it was luxuriant or sparse, whether the plants were poisonous, useless, or useful. That even then a better and more general knowledge of the flora was deemed important, is proved by the record that at the college at Newtowne, founded in 1636 and now known as Harvard University, the study of plants was part of the curriculum in every summer term. To learn the names and the striking properties, useful or harmful, of the plants of a new country is the most natural endeavor of those who are to make it their home. From that time until now, it has been the custom to teach in the schools, and in many of the colleges, just these things. Because most of us go no further in our study of plants, we conclude that this must be all. The school boy and girl painfully learn the descriptive nomenclature, as we find it set forth with wonderful clearness in Gray's Text-book of Botany—that leaves are linear or obcordate or punctate with pellucid dots; that stamens are distinct or hypogynous or tetradynamous; and then they find that the bird-foot violet is technically known as Viola pedata and the lily of the valley Convallaria majalis. But the school boy and girl have thus simply acquired one means of learning more of Nature. Botany is not a science of names, a science overloaded with names though it may be. The individual who destroys a flower by tearing it to pieces (analyzes it, as the ladies say), and finds by the aid of some tiresome artificial key the Latin name of the plant which bears it, has conquered the difficulties of the botanical alphabet; but until he goes further he knows absolutely nothing of the literature of Nature. Children now learn to read before they learn the alphabet, and in many of our better schools the pupils begin to study