Psyche; or, The Romance of Nature [pp. 464-476]

464 PSYCirE; OR, THE ROMANCE OF NATURE. [Jan.,
PSYCHE; OR, THE ROMANCE OF NATURE.*
WHO is there possessed of a delicate appreciation of the beauties of Nature who has not at some time in his life tried to enjoy
botany?
Have you never, on coming home from a country excursion
or a walk in the woods, bewitched with the perfume of flowers and
with the lovely pictures revealed to you in the vegetable kingdom-have you never looked up some special treatise on natural
history, hoping to find an intelligent guide to penetrate with
you behind the veil which your superficial observation had only
pierced?
For, of course, you know that the display of odorous petals and
the harmony of color and perfume, intended to attract and captivate, are not the most remarkable manifestations of vegetable
life. Internal organs of insignificant appearance, often not visible to the naked eye, really constitute the essential parts of the
plant.
So, tired of mysteries, you eagerly opened the volume that
was to explain everything; but what was your discomfiture to
find, instead of revelations, a series of dry lists, methodical classi
fioations, barbarous nomenclatures, systems of Tournefort, Lamarck, Jussien, Candolle, and I don't know what else-an inexplicable jumble of heterogeneous terms and polysyllables.
Dizzy and perplexed with Greek and Latin, you tossed aside
the musty volume, and with it science and its pedantic worshippers. And you were right; for pedantry, muffled in big words
and grand airs, often masks presumptuous ignorance. Real science, like truth, is attractive and accessible. Since the science
of natural laws has ceased to rest on pure speculation, it has
spoken the vulgar tongue. The faster it progresses the more it
will disdain any inheritance f~om Moli~re's doctors and other
scholars in us who make up in words for the lack of everything
else.
What should you say, now that your righteous indignation
has cooled down, if a new guide offered himself, promising to
make short work of fantastic names and dead languages, and lead
you through the realm of trees and flowers so wickedly hedged
off by pedants with a triple row of thorns?
* Traaslated froni the R~vue G6nJrale. See THE CATHOLIC WORLD for July, 1883.