Nevertheless, it afforded him satisfaction to look once more upon a book. In turning over the leaves, his heart thrilled with pleasure, as in former days, when the attainment of knowledge was his chief delight in life. What months had now elapsed since printed characters were before his eyes! Already a plan of sage and sober study was concocting in his excited mind.
“If ever I am released from captivity,” thought he, “I will certainly become a botanist. Instead of scholastic and pedantic controversies, which serve only to bewilder the human intellect, I will devote myself to a science where nature, ever varying, yet still the same, dispenses immutable laws to her disciples.”
The books forwarded for the use of the Count de Charney consisted of the Species Plantarum of Linnæus; the Institutiones rei Herbariæ of Tournefort; the Theatrum Botanicum of Bauhin; and the Phytographia, Dendrologia, and Agrostographia of Plukenet, Aldrovandus, and Scheuchzer; besides half a hundred works of minor classicality, in the French, English, and Italian languages.
Though somewhat startled by so formidable an array of learning, the Count was not discouraged; and, by way of preparation for the worst, opened the thinnest volume of the collection, and began to examine the index in search of the most euphonous titles afforded by botanic nomenclature. He longed to appropriate to his purpose some of the softer saints of the floral calendar; such as Alcea, Alisma, Andryala, Bromelia, Celosia, Coronilla, Euphrasia, Helvelia, Passiflora, Primula, Santolina, or some other equally soft to the lip and harmonious to the ear.
And, now, for the first time, he began to tremble, lest his pretty favourite should inherit some quaint or harsh patronymic. A masculine or neuter termination would put to flight all his poetical vagaries concerning his gentle friend. What, for instance, would become of his ethereal Picciola, if her earthly prototype were to be saluted as Rumex obtusifolius, Satyrium, Hyoscyamus, Gossypium, Cynoglossum, Cucubalus, Cenchrus, Buxus; or, worse still, and in more vulgar phrase, as Old Man, Dogtooth, Houndstongue, Cuckoo-flower, Devil-in-a-bush, Hen and Chickens, or Spiderwort! How should he support such a disenchantment of his imagination! No! better not to risk the vexation of such an ordeal.
Yet, in spite of himself, he found it impossible to resist the temptation of opening every successive volume—led on from page to page by the development of the mighty mysteries of nature, but irritated by the love of system prevailing among the learned, by whom so charming a science has been rendered the harshest, most technical, and most perplexed, of all the branches of natural history.
For a whole week he devoted himself to the analysis of his flower, with a view to classification, but without success. In the chaos of so many strange words, varying from system to system—bewildered by the vast and ponderous synonymy, which, like the net of Vulcan, overspreads the beauties of botany, overpowering them by its weight, he soon gave up the attempt; having consulted each author in succession, for a clew, wandering from classes to orders, from orders to tribes, from tribes to families, from families to species, from species to individuals; and losing all patience with the blind guides, ever at variance among themselves with respect to the purpose and denomination of the parts of organization in vegetable life.