The Life of John Duncan, Scotch Weaver and Botanist ;
with Sketches of his Friends and Notices of the Times. By William Jolly, F.R.S.E., F.G.S. (Regan Paul and Co.) —As Mr. Jolly was the discoverer of the Scotch weaver-botanist, it is natural that he should not willingly let his hero die. Already he has told us all about the worthy old man, in Good Words and Nature, and his appeal to the benevolence of the public was so effectual, that the poor weaver was able to spend the few last months of his life in comfort, and with the conscious- ness that at last he had been appreciated. There was really little more to tell about him than had already been told, but Mr. Jolly has evidently been ambitious to rival Dr. Samuel Smiles. He has cer- tainly all the enthusiasm and perseverance of the biographer of Thomas Edward and Robert Dick. Ho has evidently taken a vast deal of pains to ferret out all that could be learned, not only about Duncan, but about his friends and enemies, and the social and political conditions of the earlier years of the century which coincided with Duncan's youth and manhood. Mr. Jolly has Chas been able to bring together a vast array of facts illustrating the characteristics of the village and country life of Scotland about fifty years ago, the strange mixture of Calvinism, Radicalism, and loose morality which characterised its weaver and agricultural population, and the quaint aspects of its boroughs and small towns. The career of Duncan himself is traced in the minutest detail, and a fine example
it is of the successful pursuit of knowledge under what, to an onlooker, would seem the most disheartening conditions. Duncan himself never seemed to think his lot a hard one, so long as ho had an opportunity of adding to his collection of plants. In the exorcise of his weaving craft and in his frequent autumn excursions as a harvester, he traversed the greater part of Scotland, ever on the outlook for fresh specimens. By dogged perseverance he acquired a knowledge of systematic botany, beginning with Culpepper and ending with the elder Hooker. The Latin names of plants he could give off as glibly as a professor of botany, but with a pronunciation that would have horrified an Oxford Don. In other directions, too, he pushed his laudable inquisitiveness, and in his early years established an astronomical observatory for himself, in the accommodating upper branches of a tree. Yet he could not read till well advanced in years, and never fluently. In character he was upright and religious, but evidently deficient in sympathy, and with little of that sense of humour native to most Scotchmen, in spite of the famous and now rather stale taunt. Altogether, under the conditions, the man's life was an admirable one, and he deserved all the liberality which softened his last months. But his genius seems to us to have been mainly of the acquisitive kind ; he had little of the force and originality of either Edward or Dick. Had he possessed the advantage of a liberal education, he would have been known as a man of unbounded knowledge ; but we doubt if he could have initiated anything new. His story deserved to be told, certainly, but Mr. Jolly has made far too much of it. In the first place, had the book had adequate revision, and had all the redundancies been deleted, it would have been reduced to half its present size ; then, had Mr. Jolly's moral common-places been eliminated, together with the small-beer chronicles which abound, a still farther reduction would have been effected, which would have told in favour of the book as a piece of literary workmanship. For one of her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, Mr. Jolly's style and diction are at least remarkable, and the reader will often be reminded of Mrs. Malaprop. He evidently thinks that the piling-np of indiscriminate adjectives of all degrees of comparison produces a graphic effect; but inartistic confusion is the result. Altogether, the book may be described as " fine, confused reading," containing very mach that is interesting, highly credit. able to Mr. Jolly's industry and enthusiasm ; and this makes us in- clined to tolerate his malformed and extraordinary style.
Previous page
