One special department may perhaps claim notice on the ground of its supposed non-scientific character. Dr. Masters (_Gardeners' Chronicle_, April 22, 1882) says of Darwin's service to horticulture: "Let any one who knows what was the state of botany in this country even so recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, compare the feeling between botanists and horticulturists at that time with what it is now. What sympathy had the one for the pursuits of the other? The botanist looked down on the varieties, the races, and strains, raised with so much pride by the patient skill of the florist as on things unworthy of his notice and study. The horticulturist, on his side, knowing how very imperfectly plants could be studied from the mummified specimens in herbaria, which then constituted in most cases all the material that the botanist of this country considered necessary for the study of plants, naturally looked on the botanist somewhat in the light of a laborious trifler.... Darwin altered all this. He made the dry bones live; he invested plants and animals with a history, a biography, a genealogy, which at once conferred an interest and a dignity on them. Before, they were as the stuffed skin of a beast in the glass case of a museum; now they are living beings, each in their degree affected by the same circumstances that affect ourselves, and swayed, _mutatis mutandis_, by like feelings and like passions. If he had done nothing more than this we might still have claimed Darwin as a horticulturist; but as we shall see, he has more direct claims on our gratitude. The apparently trifling variations, the variations which it was once the fashion for botanists to overlook, have become, as it were, the keystone of a great theory."