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THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
Historian has, as a rule, tried to limit his efforts to indicating
the existence of these two defects and has avoided attempts
to remedy them. That he has never indulged in such attempts
it would be too much to say : disputes as to the priority of a
discovery or an invention, arguments as to the incidence of a
mere name, have at times provoked personal enmities and
occasionally given rise to national grievance. But it can fairly
be claimed that in cases where accepted beliefs and ascertained
facts are not in harmony the Natural Historian is usually disposed
to say, "So much the worse for the beliefs," whereas it will be
admitted that the Civil Historian has occasionally acted as if
he felt "so much the worse for the facts." Students of natural
things, though necessarily a somewhat serious class, are endowed
with a saving sense of humour that enables them to keep under
control those subconscious sectarian, racial and social pre-
possessions which render so many of our constitutional histories
political pamphlets writ large.
One difficulty the Natural Historian has to contend against,
which the Civil Historian can avoid, is that much of the evidence
on which he must rely is unwritten. But this has its compen-
sations : the evidence afforded by the characters and qualities
of natural things is free from certain defects inherent in human
statements and beliefs. The Natural Historian may mis-
interpret his evidence, but is not misled by the witness. This
advantage enables the Natural Historian to escape errors into
which the Civil Historian may fall when he discards as valueless
the evidence of tradition: the Natural Historian, while he
realises that tradition may be careless as regards the time when
events took place, appreciates the fact that tradition manages
to preserve the atmosphere events create.
It would be easy to illustrate the part history may play in
Botanical Study by citing instances, from many quarters, of
confusion and misapprehension due to neglect of the methods
observed in Civil History. How many of us, for example,
still believe, in spite of what the late Dr. Daydon Jackson once
told us, that the familiar plant we misname the potato was brought
to England from Virginia by Sir Walter Raleigh? How many
of us remember, notwithstanding what Mr. Lacaita has told us,
that the plant which, as Parkinson remarked in 1629, "we,
from some ignorant and idle head," term the Jerusalem artichoke,