Of folk-lore and
medicinal use and history and associations here you have hints. The
bottom of the sack is not yet; there are the monographs, years of study
expended upon one species of plant growing in one locality, perhaps; some
made up into thick books and some into broad quarto pamphlets, with most
beautiful plates, that, if you were to see them, would tempt you to cut
them out and steal them, all sunk and lost like dead ships under the
sand: piles of monographs. There are warehouses in London that are choked
to the beams of the roof with them, and every fresh exploration furnishes
another shelf-load. The source of the Nile was unknown a very few years
ago, and now, I have no doubt, there are dozens of monographs on the
flowers that flourish there. Indeed, there is not a thing that grows that
may not furnish a monograph. The author spends perhaps twenty years in
collecting his material, during which time he must of course come across
a great variety of amusing information, and then he spends another ten
years writing out a fair copy of his labours. Then he thinks it does not
quite do in that form, so he snips a paragraph out of the beginning and
puts it at the end; next he shifts some more matter from the middle to
the preface; then he thinks it over. It seems to him that it is too big,
it wants condensation. The scientific world will say he has made too much
of it; it ought to read very slight, and present the facts while
concealing the labour.
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