us. We know him as he actually lived and moved among his fellow-men. The very lights and shades thrown on his character by the narrative give it additional force, for they convince us of its intense truth and reality. Nor is it only as a life of Johnson that Boswell's book has value for us; it is the most important contribution yet made to a knowledge of actual living and thinking in the 18th century. "It is not speaking with exaggeration," says Carlyle, "but with strict measured sobriety, to say that this book of Boswell's will give us more real insight into the history of England, during those days, than twenty other books, falsely entitled 'Histories,' which take to themselves that special aim."
A short memoir of Boswell was written by Malone and will be found in Nichol's Literary Anecdotes. It is also reprinted, with some extracts from Boswell's letters to Malone, in the edition of the Life published by Bohn, 1859. The Letters to W. J. Temple and Andrew Erskine were printed in 1857; in the introduction will be found a pretty complete notice of Boswell's minor writings. Boswelliana have been published in the second volume of the Philobiblon Society Miscellanies, 1855-6, and by Dr Charles Rogers, 1874. Editions of Boswell's great work are very numerous; perhaps the amended form of Croker's first edition, by Wright (Bohn, 10 vols., 1859), is the most helpful. The famous essays on Boswell by Macaulay and Carlyle may be taken as mutually corrective and supplementary.
BOTANY
THE science of Botany includes everything relating to the Vegetable Kingdom, whether in a living or in a fossil state. Its object is not, as some have supposed, merely to name and arrange the vegetable productions of the globe. It embraces a consideration of the external forms of plants—of their anatomical structure, however minute—of the functions which they perform—of their arrangement and classification—of their distribution over the globe at the present and at former epochs—and of the uses to which they are subservient. It examines the plant in its earliest state of development, when it appears as a simple cell, and follows it through all its stages of progress until it attains maturity. It takes a comprehensive view of all the plants which cover the earth, from the minutest lichen or moss, only visible by the aid of the microscope, to the most gigantic productions of the tropics. It marks the relations which subsist between all members of the vegetable world, and traces the mode in which the most despised weeds contribute to the growth of the mighty denizens of the forest.
The plants which adorn the globe more or less in all countries must necessarily have attracted the attention of mankind from the earliest times. The science that treats of them dates back to the days of Solomon, for that wise monarch "spake of trees," from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall. The Chaldeans, Egyptians, and Greeks were the early cultivators of science, and Botany was not neglected, although the study of it was mixed up with crude speculations as to vegetable life, and as to the change of plants into animals. Æsculapius and his priests, the Asclepiades, who studied the art of medicine, had their attention directed to plants in a pharmaceutical point of view. About 300 years before Christ Theophrastus wrote a History of Plants, and described about 500 species used for the treatment of diseases. Dioscorides, a Greek writer, who appears to have flourished about the time of Nero, issued a work on Materia Medica. The elder Pliny described about a thousand plants, many of them famous for their medicinal virtues. Asiatic and Arabian writers also took up this subject. Little, however, was done in the science of botany, properly so called, until the 16th century of the Christian era, when the revival of learning dispelled the darkness which had long hung over Europe. Brunfels, a physician of Bern, has been looked upon as the restorer of the science in Europe. He published a History of Plants, illustrated by figures, about the beginning of the 16th century.
One of the earliest attempts at a methodical arrangement of plants was made in Florence by Andreas Cæsalpinus, a native of Arezzo, some time professor of botany at Padua, and afterwards physician to Pope Clement VIII. He is called by Linnæus primus verus systematicus. In his work De Plantis, published at Florence in 1583, he distributed the 1520 plants then known into fifteen classes—the distinguishing characters being taken from the fruit.
John Ray, a native of Essex, did much to advance the science of botany. He was born in 1628, and died in 1705. He promulgated a system which may be considered as the dawn of the "natural system" of the present day (Ray, Methodus Plantarum, 1682). He separated flowering from flowerless plants, and divided the former into Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. His orders were founded on a correct idea of the affinities of plants, and he far outstripped his contemporaries in his enlightened views of arrangement.
About the year 1670 Dr Robert Morison[1] of Aberdeen published a systematic arrangement of plants. He divided them into eighteen classes, distinguishing plants according as they were woody or herbaceous, and taking into account the nature of the flowers and fruit. In 1690 Rivinus[2] promulgated a classification founded chiefly on the forms of the flowers. Tournefort[3] about the same time took up the subject of vegetable taxonomy. He was a contemporary of Ray, and was professor of botany at Paris in 1683. He was long at the head of the French school of botany, and published a systematic arrangement in 1694-1700. He described about 8000 species of plants, and distributed them into twenty-two classes, chiefly according to the form of the corolla, distinguishing herbs and under-shrubs on the one hand from trees and shrubs on the other. The system of Tournefort was for a longtime adopted on the Continent, but was ultimately displaced by that of Linnæus.
Carl von Linné, or, as he is commonly called, Linnæus,[4] was born on the 23d of May 1707, at the village of Rooshoolt (Râshult), in Smaland, a province of Sweden, where his father, Nicholas Linnæus, was clergyman. He entered as a pupil at the University of Lund, and about the years 1727-28 was received into the house of Stobæus, a physician in that city, where he had abundant opportunities of prosecuting natural history. He afterwards proceeded to Upsal, and had to struggle with great difficulties during his studies there. He aided Celsius in his Hierobotanicon, or account of the plants of Scripture, and he became assistant to Rudbeck, professor of botany. He afterwards travelled in Lapland, took his degree in Holland, visited
- ↑ Morison, Prœludia Botanica, 1672; Plantarum Historia Universalis, 1680.
- ↑ Rivinus (Augustus Quirinus) paterno nomine Bachmann, Introductio generalis in Rem Herbariam, Lipsiæ, 1690.
- ↑ Tournefort, Elémens de Botanique, 1694; Institutiones Rei Herbariæ, 1700.
- ↑ Linnæus, Systema Naturæ, 1735; Genera Plantarum, 1737, Philosophia Botanica, 1751; Species Plantarum, 1753.
