Excerpt from The Natural History of Plants, Vol. 1: Their Forms, Growth, Reproduction and Distribution
Not long ago two artisans, who had borrowed a copy of The Natural History of Plants from one of the Vienna public libraries and had studied its pages, called upon me, asking me to show them under the microscope some of the things there described.
It seems that without any special educational advantages they bad availed themselves of leisure moments to extend their knowledge, and had read the work with profit. On leaving, they thanked me in simple words for the pleasure, instruction, and stimulus which they had derived from the perusal of my book.
I confess that these words gave me vastly more pleasure than many of the verbose and flattening reviews that had appeared in newspapers and scientific journals, many of which conveyed the impression of being the result of hasty skimming of copies sent by the publisher.
The satisfaction which the little incident gave me was the greater, in that it was an assurance that I had achieved what had been my intention, namely, to write a hook which might serve as a source of knowledge, not only for specialists and scholars, but also for the many who, though compiled to follow some practical calling, still take an interest in science, and who wish, each in his own particular degree, to obtain information of its progress.
Popular treatises on the results of scientific investigation are by no means rare with us Germans; but in too many cases scientific problems involving serious thought are touched superficially, and, like the stone in a sweet fruit, are embedded in picturesque and attractive accounts of things purely of subordinate importance. The reader, gratified by the elegant phraseology, passes by the kernel of fact, and derives little profit from the book.
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