which had been accumulated in all parts of the science; no one really knew what a wealth there was at that time of important facts; least of all was it possible to form a judgment on the matter from the text-books of the period, which were deficient in ideas and facts, and crammed with a superfluous terminology; their mode of treating their subject was trivial and tasteless, and whatever was specially worth knowing and important to the student they did not contain. Those who undertook really scientific enquiries separated themselves from those who dealt with botany after the old schematism of the Linnaean school; but botanical instruction, the propagation of knowledge, was almost everywhere in the hands of this school, though it was the one least fitted for the task; and thus a mass of lifeless phrases was the instruction offered to the majority of students under the name of botany, with the inevitable effect of repelling the more gifted natures from the study. This was the evil result of the old and foolish notion, that the sole or chief business of every botanist is to trifle away time in plant-collecting in wood and meadow and in rummaging in herbaria, proceedings which could do no good to systematic botany even as understood by the Linnaean school. Even the better sort lost the sense for higher knowledge while occupying themselves in this way with the vegetable world; the powers of the mind could not fail after a time to deteriorate, and every text-book of the period on every page supplies proof of this deterioration.
But such a condition of things is dangerous for every science; of what profit is it, that single men of superior merit advance this or that part of the science when a connected view of the whole is wanting, and the beginner has no opportunity of studying the best things in their mutual relations. However, the right man was found at the right moment to rouse easy indolence from its torpor, and to show his contemporaries, not in Germany only but in all countries where botany was studied, that no progress was possible in this
