sed ignorance as to their
identity; another thought he knew but couldn't remember; a third said
they looked like maples; and a fourth thought that silence, like
honesty, as the copybooks used to tell us, was the best policy. And
yet the name linden was writ large on those trees,--on the beautiful
gray bark, the alternate method of twig arrangement, the fat red
winter buds, which shone in the sunshine like rubies, and especially
on the little cymes of pendulous, pea-like fruit, each cyme attached
to its membranaceous bract or wing. Of course, if the pedestrians had
been in the midst of rich woods and there found a trunk of great girth
and rough bark, surrounded by several handsome young stems with
close-fitting coats, the group looking for all the world like a
comfortable old mother with a family of fresh-faced, willowy,
marriageable daughters, every member of the quartet would have
chorused, bass-wood.

But no one need be ashamed to confess an ignorance of botany.
Botanical ignorance is more common than poverty. It has always been
prevalent. And the cause of it may be traced back to the author of all
our short-comings, old Adam. We read that every beast of the field and
every fowl of the air were brought to Adam to see what he would call
them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the
name thereof. But why, oh why, didn't he name the trees? If he had
known enough of the science to partake of the fruit of the tree of
life he might have lived long enough to write a systematic botany,
satisfactory alike to the Harvard school of standpat systematists and
their manual-ripping rivals in nomenclature. But he didn't; and no one
else may ever hope to do it.

Eve had never read a book on how to know the wild fruits, and her
first field work in botany had a disastrous termination; it
complicated the subject by the punishment of thorns and thistles.
Cain's conduct brought both botany and agriculture into disrepute.
Little more is heard until Pharaoh's daughter went botanizing and
found Moses in the bulrushes. Oshea and Jehoshua showed some
advancement by bringing back grapes and figs and pomegranates from the
brook Eschol as the proudest products of the promised land. But
Solomon was the only man in the olden times who ever knew botany
thoroughly. We are told that he was wiser than all men. "Prove it,"
says some doubting reader, moving for a more specific statement. So
the biographer adds: "He spake of trees