APPENDIX.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE,

Read at the London Institution, May 2nd, 1825.

THE history of botany as a science has often been given in various forms and languages. It makes a principal part of an Introductory Discourse which I had the honour of delivering at the opening of the Linnæan Society in 1788, and which is published in the Linnæan Transactions and elsewhere. The subject, under a rather different point of view, is continued in the article "Botany" of the Supplement to the Edinburgh Cyclopædia. It would ill become me to take up your time with what is detailed in those essays, though I have heard much of the former introduced into the lectures of other teachers; and if it tended to entertain or inform their hearers, my principal ends in the original composition were answered. I conceive that a writer on scientific subjects is most honoured, when his observations and discoveries are used, without mistrust or particular acknowledgement, as current coin, whose value is undisputed, and whose stamp and date are easily ascertained by those who are curious in such parti

culars. But an author himself ought to be the last person in the world to look for such authority or to repose upon it. The more he has done, the more he will find to do, and, if the world should be disposed to give him credit for any thing, the more he will be aware of the duty and the difficulty of not misleading its confidence or disappointing its expectations. When science has been long and extensively cultivated, and is become an object of great popular attention, it assumes a very different character from the abstruse pursuits of the cloister or the schools, or the speculations of a few recluse and abstracted proficients. No study has undergone a more remarkable change in this respect than botany. From its earliest dawn as a science, in the writings of the Greeks and Arabians, almost to our own time, it has been considered in no other light than as a branch of medical study; and even the highest praise bestowed upon this, his favourite pursuit, by the great Haller, is, that "it equals every branch of medical science in utility, and surpasses every one in agreeableness." The chief object of the earliest and most learned botanists, after the revival of literature, was to ascertain the plants used in medicine by the ancients; and however imperfectly described in their works, the vegetable kingdom was to these botanical physicians a great storehouse of remedies, whose recorded qualities were scarcely to be contested or examined, provided the individual plants could be settled beyond dispute. This indeed was the great difficulty,-to the more or less complete removal of which we are indebted for the existence of botany as a learned pursuit; which having engaged, and often baffled, the powers of many a first-rate genius, has taken its rank among the more distinguished studies of philosophers. The attention of many following ages was devoted to the mere discrimination of one kind of plant from another, before any ideas of the necessity or the principles of arrangement, much less of the constitution and œconomy of vegetable bodies, or of sound principles

of inquiry into their natures and properties, had ever entered into the mind of man. Such objects are comparatively of recent date. Some of them have arisen almost under our own observation. They are now become the most important and instructive part of botanical science; and when united to an elegant and disinterested love of the beauty of nature, as the work of God and an emblem of his own boundless perfection, they constitute, in all their branches, one of the most refined, improving, and unexceptionable pursuits, that can claim the notice or employ the leisure of persons of either sex, or of any age or condition. Can it be necessary for me, before I go any further, to expatiate on the recommendations and advantages of my favourite study, to which I have devoted my life? I take it for granted that none of you would take the trouble to come here without some prepossession in its favour; and if your partiality be not increased by the views, however limited, which I shall have time and opportunity to lay before you, I might now raise your expectations only to disappoint them.

We cannot proceed far in even the most general and comprehensive views of the physiology of plants, without a perception that such inquiries are eminently useful in teaching us to think, to consider the most common objects in a perfectly new light, and with the help, as it were, of new senses. How many of the more intelligent and improved of rational beings have enjoyed, and daily do enjoy, the beauty and perfume of flowers, the verdure and grateful shade of trees, in all their luxuriancy of foliage,—without considering by what means or for what purpose those lovely forms and colours are so infinitely varied! How many taste the delicious variety of fruits, and even see them grow gradually to perfection, without bestowing a thought on the possible means by which these various exquisite scents and flavours are extracted from the same common soil; or how the air, the warmth, or the light of heaven, lend their respective assistance to the production of such won

ders! To these contemplations the young mind may most beneficially be directed; but there is no mind above being improved by reflection, and the requisite exertion soon brings its own reward. But if the inquiries to which I have just alluded, rarely enter into the contemplation of a common observer, how much more seldom do the most reflecting minds spontaneously notice, with due attention, those almost infinitely varied circumstances of form, situation, or colour, by which individuals of the vegetable as well as of the animal creation, and their several parts, are distinguished; observing, at the same time, those delicate and intricate combinations and coincidences by which the whole of nature is harmonized, and her manifold irregularities and luxuriances reduced to the most perfect order! Here indeed our limited faculties fail us, as we attempt to measure them against the operations of Omniscience; but we may derive abundant consolation from the reflection, that we are allowed and enabled to consider those operations at all, and to converse, at the most humble distance, with Him, who in perfect wisdom has made them all, and who, in condescending to render his laws in any measure intelligible to us, has manifestly designed that we should at least try to understand them. If he has not made the study of these natural laws, like those of his moral government, our indispensable duty, he has reserved no ordinary reward for such of his children as raise their thoughts to him even among these his lowest works. What he has made beautiful to us, he doubtless intended we should admire; and in whatever form we are allowed to trace the footsteps of his wisdom and beneficence, it must be, in every instance, for the great ends of our own moral and intellectual improvement.

Such considerations as these cannot but suggest themselves to every mind directed to the observation of nature. They stimulate us to exertion, and they reward our perseverance. They furnish us also with a ready answer to all who doubt the importance or the utility of our pursuit, and

who think it a degradation of their own sublime talents or characters, to submit either to the guidance or the admonition of infinite wisdom, however manifested to us.

How far the attentive study, or even the slightest observation of nature, is delightful and salutary to the mind, let those say who have, by a natural taste or an acquired habit, given themselves to such contemplations. Is it better to walk abroad with the eyes open or shut? Is the interchange of ideas in human society delightful and instructive? Are the imitations of nature in the finest works of art admirable? And shall it not be thought a privilege to hold converse with the source of all thought and wisdom and perfection? Do not the changes of seasons, and the endless variations in the aspect of nature and her productions, excite perpetual attention, and entertain us with pever-ceasing variety? If our deepest inquiries lead us so far as to understand why a bud unfolds itself in the spring, and a leaf falls in autumn, we shall have learned enough to convince us of the existence of design in nature, and of the application of the most wise and compendious laws to the most decided and satisfactory ends. One fact, thus established and understood, may serve the philosopher as a basis, not by his machinery to overturn the world, but to raise a structure that shall truly reach from this world to another. The study of nature is undoubtedly, above all others, a science of practical observation; but to withhold the exercise of our reasoning faculties as we pursue it, would be a strange example of intellectual blindness. The old physicians indeed, to whom I have alluded, were often content to adopt the opinions and follow the practice of men who had lived a few centuries before them; and some have declared they would rather be in the wrong with an ancient than in the right with a modern. But such an abject prostration of the best faculties and duties of man has never long existed, except where the most sordid interest has acquired an exclusive dominion. In medicine and natural science such a tyranny must soon work its own cure;