they may find on every hand models ready for their use. Two citations from the introductory pages of Lindley's classic, The Theory and Practice of Horticulture, must suffice to exemplify his incisive style—Le style c'est l'homme, and Lindley the man hated circumlocution and had no time to waste—"there are, doubtless, many men of cultivated or idle minds who think waiting upon Providence much better than any attempt to improve their condition by the exertion of their reasoning faculties. For such persons books are not written"; and again, with reference to the divorce in current literature between theory and practice, "Horticulture is by these means rendered a very complicated subject, so that none but practical gardeners can hope to pursue it successfully; and like all empirical things, it is degraded into a code of peremptory precepts."
Publications. "The Theory and Practice of Horticulture."
Though many aspects of Lindley's work must perforce be treated of in briefest form no sketch could have the slenderest value which did not take into account his chief works, The Theory and Practice of Horticulture, The Vegetable Kingdom, and the Botanical Register; nor from a survey no matter how brief may reference to his contributions to our knowledge of orchids be omitted.
The value of Lindley's great work on The Theory and Practice of Horticulture may be best gauged by the fact that as a statement of horticultural principles it is the best book extant. Though the botanist of the present day finds on perusing this work that physiological knowledge in 1840 was in a singularly crude state, and may rejoice at the rapid progress of discovery since the time when Lindley's book was written, yet the fact remains that few, if any, men at the present day could make a better statement of the physiological principles underlying practical horticulture than that presented by John Lindley.
Indeed it is a strange fact, and one worthy of the attention of our physiologists, that the gardeners are still endeavouring to puzzle out for themselves the reasons for their practices unaided by the physiologists. An interesting illustration of
