Moss Garden

A capstone on an old gateway post was originally covered with pebble dash. The now-weathered cement provides a calcareous substrate for an intriguing mini-garden.

An old faithful - the yellow splash of a clump of Xanthoria lichen is quite noticeable; but as a herald of spring...

the fruiting capsule of a clump of moss growing at the top of the stone. This, I think, is a member of the Tortula genus. Most probably Tortula muralis - the specific epithet seems appropriate, and it is, after all, a very widely distributed and common moss.

Alpine Meadow

Spring is coming! Indeed in selected places, like here in the Botanic Gardens, it is already well on its way!

Undaunted Perserverance

... one would suppose that the faculty of adding anything whatever to natural knowledge was one possessed by extremely few persons. I believe, on the contrary, that any man possessed of average ability and somewhat more than average perseverance, is capable, if he will, of doing good original scientific work.

Any hardworking and commonly intelligent man, who likes his profession, will make a good soldier, or lawyer, or doctor, though that combination of powers which makes the great general, or the great jurist, or the great physician, is given to but few. So it is with the pursuit of Science: assuredly not every one of her followers, very probably not one among us now present, will become a Linnaeus, or a Cuvier, or an Agassiz.

It may not be given to any of us to make some brilliant discovery, or to first expound some illuminating generalization; but we can, each and all, if we will, do good and valuable work in elucidating the details of various branches of knowledge.

All that is needed for such work, besides some leisure, intelligence, and common-sense (and the more of each the better), is undaunted perseverance and absolute truthfulness; a perseverance unabated by failure after failure, and a truthfulness incapable of the least perversion (either by way of omission or commission) in the description of an observation or of an experiment, or of the least reluctance to acknowledge an error once it is found to have been made.

Moreover, this love of truth must extend to a constant searching and inquisition of the mind, with the perpetual endeavour to keep inferences from observation or experiment unbiased, so far as may be, by natural predilections or favourite theories.

Perfect success in such an endeavour is, perhaps, unattainable, but the scientific worker must ever strive after it; theories are necessary to guide and systematize his work, and to lead to its prosecution in new directions, but they must be servants, and not masters.

Quotation: Henry Newell Martin (1848-1896), student of Thomas Henry Huxley who was inaugural Professor of Physiology at Johns Hopkins University. Inaugural Address, The Study & Teaching of Biology. 1876.

Impatient of Drudgery

I think it more befitting to my present position however, that I should address myself especially to younger students of natural science, with a view to pointing out some of the mistakes which they perhaps are particularly liable to fall into, mistakes which no doubt further study would enable them to correct for themselves, but which often remain uncorrected very much because the studies are so fitfully pursued that it is only when some circumstance arouses a public interest in scientific subjects that their attention is drawn to them again. It may appear but a commonplace observation when I say that one of the first things to be guarded against is impatience of the drudgery needful to master even the alphabet of almost any branch of science.

I mean more by this than that there is no royal road to learning, and my meaning extends to this, namely, that there is a great temptation to forsake the steady pursuit of knowledge along the more tedious pathways of careful observation and well-considered induction for the more attractive highways of fashionable theory. I am not alluding now to those whose chief object is to get a reputation for the possession of scientific knowledge careless as to the basis upon which that reputation may rest.

It may suffice for such to read a review of them, to plunge hotly into a discussion probably with far more rashness of assertion than they dare to whom the subject had been long familiar. But I speak rather of this danger as besetting those who are sincere in their desire to get to the root of matters. It is a seductive error. It seems so much easier to discuss the merits of a theory than to plod along with the accumulation of facts, forgetting that we are not qualified to judge of the merits of a theory until we have a wide knowledge of the facts upon which it is based.

Presidential Address, by Right Reverend Bishop Samuel Tarratt Nevill, to the Otago Institute, 17 January 1878. Transactions and Proceeding of the New Zealand Institute. Volume 10, pp562-566