Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Singular specimens of the Edinburgh practice of criticism. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
8/32 page 8
![the book succeed. When success is attained, you come forward to claim as yoiirs the property produced by this combination of capital and labour. Nothing so perfectly extravagant is to be found in Mr. ©’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature. The reader will now understand our respective positions just before the Second Edition of the Manual of Botany was put to press. I was still desirous of agree- ing with you, willing to pay you what I conceived to be your due, but deter- mined not to surrender, at your dictation, property to which you had no title- It was necessary to put the work immediately to press, and as the first edition had only been finished eighteen months, it occiu-red to me that the work could require but little alteration. Though botany is a progressive science, it does not, as your Reviewer pretends, become antiquated in eighteen months. More- over, as I believed yoiu’ resolution to repudiate the work could not endure long, when you saw that you were unable to coerce me, I resolved to reprint the work verbatim^ correcting only the evident eiTors of the press, and relying upon your recovering a more reasonable state of mind by the time a third edition was required. I was merciful enough to believe, that you would not entirely aban- don the line of conduct that men of business aic accustomed to follow. With this view, I employed a gentleman well acquainted with botanical literature, to edit the Second Edition of the Manual anonymously. I gave him instructions to the above eficct, and he fulfilled his duties, as I think, honestly and creditably. The Second Edition of the Manual of Botany, thus prepared, was duly published, and shortly aftenvards the “ Review” to which I have referred, appeared in a newspaper with which you are connected so intimately, that 1 cannot be far wrong in presuming that you saw the review before it was pub- lished^ and knew that it was to be published^ and did not prevent nor forbid it. Whether this is the case or not, if the Review w'ere a fair and honest critique, written to serve the cause of science, I should have no right to complain of it. Neither should I have any light to complain of the condemnation of the book, if it were true, that by bad editing, the work had been put into a condition that was injurious to your reputation. My complaint is, that the charges made in the Review, and the colouring given to them, are, for the most part, false, and that you, nevertheless, per- mitted the article to be printed as a bona fide Review; and when it was formally brought under your notice, after publication, did not disavow nor dis- countenance it. Upon the publication of the Review, I sent it to the Editor of the Second Edition of the Manual, whose reply to it I give in the Appendix, No. 15. After reading the attack and the Editor’s reply, I have compared the First Edition of the Manual with the Second Edition, prepared for press by him. The Review states that “ there are imperfections in this edition of a more serious nature” [than those in the first edition] ;—that the “former errors arc multiplied, so as utterly to destroy all confidence in the book as a work of reference.” In opposition to these reckless statements, I declare that I have counted the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28044009_0010.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
