a certain admixture of fiction, and it is certain that Boswell exaggerates the sympathy expressed in word or deed by Johnson for some of his own tenderer foibles. But, on the whole, the best judges are of opinion that Boswell’s accuracy is exceptional, as it is undoubtedly seconded by a power of observation of a singular retentiveness and intensity. The difficulty of dramatic description can only be realized, as Jowett well pointed out, by those who have attempted it, and it is not until we compare Boswell’s reports with those of less skilful hearers that we can appreciate the skill with which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches. The result is that Johnson, not, it is true, in the early days of his poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature, but in the fulness of fame and competence of fortune from 1763 to 1784, is better known to us than any other man in history. The old theory to explain such a marvel (originally propounded by Gray when the Tour in Corsica appeared) that “any fool may write a valuable book by chance” is now regarded as untenable. If fool is a word to describe Boswell (and his folly was at times transcendent) he wrote his great book because and not in despite of the fact that he was one. There can be no doubt, in fact, that he was a biographical genius, and that he arranged his opportunities just as he prepared his transitions and introduced those inimitable glosses by which Johnson’s motives are explained, his state of mind upon particular occasions indicated, and the general feeling of his company conveyed. This remarkable literary faculty, however, was but a fraction of the total make-up requisite to produce such a masterpiece as the Life. There is a touch of genius, too, in the naïf and imperturbable good nature and persistency (“Sir, I will not be baited with ’what’ and ‘why.’ ‘Why is a cow’s tail long?’ ‘Why is a fox’s tail bushy?’ ”), and even in the abnegation of all personal dignity, with which Boswell pursued his hero. As he himself said of Goldsmith, “He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged.” Character, the vital principle of the individual, is the ignis fatuus of the mechanical biographer. Its attainment may be secured by a variety of means—witness Xenophon, Cellini, Aubrey, Lockhart and Froude—but it has never been attained with such complete intensity as by Boswell in his Life of Johnson. The more we study Boswell, the more we compare him with other biographers, the greater his work appears.
The eleventh edition of Boswell’s Johnson was brought out by John Wilson Croker in 1831; in this the original text is expanded by numerous letters and variorum anecdotes and is already knee-deep in annotation. Its blunders provoked the celebrated and mutually corrective criticisms of Macaulay and Carlyle. Its value as an unrivalled granary of Johnsoniana, stored opportunely before the last links with a Johnsonian age had disappeared, has not been adequately recognized. A new edition of the original text was issued in 1874 by Percy Fitzgerald (who has also written a useful life of James Boswell in 2 vols., London, 1891); a six-volume edition, including the Tour and Johnsoniana, was published by the Rev. Alexander Napier in 1884; the definitive edition is that by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 6 vols., 1887, with copious annotations and a model index. A generously illustrated edition was completed in 1907 in two large volumes by Roger Ingpen, and reprints of value have also been edited by R. Carruthers (with woodcuts), A. Birrell, Mowbray Morris (Globe edition) and Austin Dobson. A short biography of Boswell was written in 1896 by W. Keith Leask. Boswell’s commonplace-book was published in 1876, under the title of Boswelliana, with a memoir by the Rev. C. Rogers. (T. Se.)
BOSWORTH, JOSEPH (1789–1876), British Anglo-Saxon
scholar, was born in Derbyshire in 1789. Educated at Repton,
whence he proceeded to Aberdeen University, he became in 1817
vicar of Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire, and devoted his spare
time to literature and particularly to the study of Anglo-Saxon.
In 1823 appeared his Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar. In
1829 Bosworth went to Holland as chaplain, first at Amsterdam
and then at Rotterdam. He remained in Holland until 1840,
working there on his Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language
(1838), his best-known work. In 1857 he became rector of Water
Shelford, Buckinghamshire, and in the following year was
appointed Rawlinson professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He
gave to the university of Cambridge in 1867 £10,000 for the
establishment of a professorship of Anglo-Saxon. He died on the
27th of May 1876, leaving behind him a mass of annotations on
the Anglo-Saxon charters.
BOTANY (from Gr. βοτάνη, plant; βόσκειν, to graze), the
science which includes everything relating to the vegetable
kingdom, whether in a living or in a fossil state. 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, 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
organism, 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 plant world, including those
between existing groups and those which are known only from
their fossilized remains preserved in the rocks. We deal here
with the history and evolution of the science.
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, who “spake of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall.” The Chaldaeans, 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. 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. Otto Brunfels, a physician of Bern, has been looked upon as the restorer of the science in Europe. In his Herbarium, printed at Strassburg (1530–1536), he gave descriptions of a large number of plants, chiefly those of central Europe, illustrated by beautiful woodcuts. He was followed by other writers,—Leonhard Fuchs, whose Historia Stirpium (Basel, 1542) is worthy of special note for its excellent woodcuts; Hieronymus Bock, whose Kreutter Buch appeared in 1539; and William Turner, “The Father of English Botany,” the first part of whose New Herbal, printed in English, was issued in 1551. The descriptions in these early works were encumbered with much medicinal detail, including speculations as to the virtues of plants. Plants which were strikingly alike were placed together, but there was at first little attempt at systematic classification. A crude system, based on the external appearance of plants and their uses to man, was gradually evolved, and is well illustrated in the Herbal, issued in 1597 by John Gerard (1545–1612), a barber-surgeon, who had a garden in Holborn, and was a keen student of British plants.
One of the earliest attempts at a methodical arrangement of plants was made in Florence by Andreas Caesalpinus (1519–1603), who is called by Linnaeus 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 (1627–1705) did much to advance the science of botany, and was also a good zoologist. 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 (or “classes”) were founded to some extent on a correct idea of the affinities of plants, and he far outstripped his contemporaries in his enlightened views of arrangement.
