ng and many-sided
significance, is even yet only beginning to be understood; but its
bearing upon the study of what we call natural history would seem to be
evident. My own experience as a dabbler in botany and ornithology has
convinced me that the pursuit of such researches is not at all out of
the spirit of the familiar line,--

"The proper study of mankind is man,"--

whatever the author of the line may have himself intended by his
apothegm. To become acquainted with the peculiarities of plants or birds
is to increase one's knowledge of beings of his own sort.

There is room, I think, for a treatise on analogical botany,--a study of
the human nature of plants. Thoroughly and sympathetically done, the
work would be both surprising and edifying. It would give us a better
opinion of plants, and possibly a poorer opinion of ourselves. Some
wholesome first lessons of this kind we have all taken, as a matter of
course. "We all do fade as a leaf." "All flesh is grass, and all the
goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field." There are no
household words more familiar than such texts. But the work of which I
am thinking will deal not so much with our likeness to tree and herb as
with the likeness of tree and herb to us; and furthermore, it will go
into the whole subject, systematically and at length. Meanwhile, it is
open even to an amateur to offer something, in a general and discursive
way, upon so inviting a theme, and especially to call attention to its
scope and variety.

As I sit at my desk, the thistles are in their glory, and in a vase at
my elbow stands a single head of the tall swamp variety, along with a
handful of fringed gentians. Forgetting what it is, one cannot help
pronouncing the thistle beautiful,--a close bunch of minute rose-purple
flowers. But who could ever feel toward it as toward the gentian? Beauty
is a thing not merely of form and color, but of memory and association.
The thistle is an ugly customer. In a single respect it lays itself out
to be agreeable; but even its beauty is too much like that of some
venomous reptile. Yet it has its friends, or, at all events, its patrons
(if you wish to catch butterflies, go to the thistle pasture), and no
doubt could give forty eloquent and logical excuses for its offensive
traits. Probably it felicitates itself upon its shrewdness, and pities
the poor estate of its defenseless neighbors. How they must envy its
happier fortune! It sees them brows