Inaugural Paper. 7 



sures around mc of the land and sea, I never learnt at school so 

 much as to distinguish a hemlock from a parsnip, or a speedwell 

 from a forget- uie-not. That compulsory ignorance can never be 

 effectually repaired; but the very little botany (for instance) which 

 I have since acquired has been to me, both at Harrow and else- 

 where, a source of incalculable delight. From the end of February, 

 when the hazels are beginning to scatter the yellow gold-dust out 

 of their catkins, and show the soft brilliant crimson fdaments of 

 their female flowers, to the late autumn when a few battered and 

 miserable buttercups are the sole representatives of the floral world, 

 and we must content ourselves for beauty with the moss, with what 

 Ruskin calls its " rounded bosses of furred and beaming green — 

 its traceries of intricate silver, and fringes lustrous, arborescent, 

 burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy tra 

 verses of silken change," — from the time when the ashbuds are 

 black in March through every grove, and the " gummy chestnut 

 buds," are glistening in the breezy blue of April, till the time when 

 we see the fairy islet in the split husk of the horse-chestnut, the 

 year to the observant e3'e is one long calendar of speaking loveli- 

 ness. I used at one time merely to admire the strange brightness 

 of the celandines with which the Park is all ablaze in early spring; 

 but I admire them ten times more now that I understand something 

 of the nature and habits of the flower, and can enter into the great 

 moral of the poem which Wordsworth has addressed to it : — 



" To be a prodigal's favourite, then worse truth 

 A miser's pensioner — beliold our lot ! 

 O man, that from thy fair and shining youth, 

 Age might but take the things youth needed not ! " 



If any of us can learn to gain but a tithe of such pleasures, I 

 am convinced that the inauguration of our little society will not 

 have been purposeless or vain. Any who are lukewarm in the 

 enquiries which interest us will soon drop off, but enough I trust 

 will remain to make us feel that our progress is neither contemptible, 

 nor lacking in enjoyment. When we learn that on an open piece 

 of ground in Battersea Park two gentlemen on one day collected 

 230 species of plants, — that a prisoner at Pentonville found some 

 thirty grasses merely on the narrow green strip which bordered 

 a few yards between the two walls by which he was allowed 

 to walk, — we need hardly doubt that we shall find enough to 

 occupy us. " In the moorlands about me," says a great writer, " I 

 have never been alone and never idle, — never alone, because when 

 man was not with me I had companions in every bee and flower 

 and pebble ; and never idle because I could not pass a swamp or a 

 tuft of heather, without finding in it a fairy tale, of which I could 



