the service a worthy one. Not only so, but we may even be
helpful to science herself; for she has suffered by her proud severance
from the arts; and having made too little effort to realise her
discoveries to vulgar eyes, has herself lost true measure of what was
chiefly precious in them.

106. Take Botany, for instance. Our scientific botanists are, I think,
chiefly at present occupied in distinguishing species, which perfect
methods of distinction will probably in the future show to be
indistinct;--in inventing descriptive names of which a more advanced
science and more fastidious scholarship will show some to be
unnecessary, and others inadmissible;--and in microscopic investigations
of structure, which through many alternate links of triumphant
discovery that tissue is composed of vessels, and that vessels are
composed of tissue, have not hitherto completely explained to us either
the origin, the energy, or the course of the sap; and which however
subtle or successful, bear to the real natural history of plants only
the relation that anatomy and organic chemistry bear to the history of
men. In the meantime, our artists are so generally convinced of the
truth of the Darwinian theory that they do not always think it necessary
to show any difference between the foliage of an elm and an oak; and the
gift-books of Christmas have every page surrounded with laboriously
engraved garlands of rose, shamrock, thistle, and forget-me-not, without
its being thought proper by the draughtsman, or desirable by the public,
even in the case of those uncommon flowers, to observe the real shape of
the petals of any one of them.

107. Now what we especially need at present for educational purposes is
to know, not the anatomy of plants, but their biography--how and where
they live and die, their tempers, benevolences, malignities, distresses,
and virtues. We want them drawn from their youth to their age, from bud
to fruit. We ought to see the various forms of their diminished but
hardy growth in cold climates, or poor soils; and their rank or wild
luxuriance, when full-fed, and warmly nursed. And all this we ought to
have drawn so accurately, that we might at once compare any given part
of a plant with the same part of any other, drawn on the like
conditions. Now, is not this a work which we may set about here in
Oxford, with good hope and much pleasure? I think it is so important,
that the first exercise in drawing I shall put befo