12 AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND 



in my type than in our King, but for some persons a 

 King can commit ADULTERY, A CRIME, and not be a 

 criminal as a common mortal, for, according to some 

 casuists, what his crime with one is virtue, with another, 

 especially when that manKing or not has written some 



religious poetry I think I have done 



with my digressions of my " never forgotten Neologist" 

 The chords of my soulhe had touched with his irrational 



hatred are still vibrating ! ! This closed 



the first act of my debut in life. Then I changed, in 

 one way for the worse, but every day adding some- 

 thing to my theories of life. 



I shall pass over all my tribulations during the 

 year 1829, the most unlucky and inauspicious of my 

 life, so much so as willing to be gone ad pair es. At 

 the close of that year I had the good luck to find a 

 situation where I found a library at my disposal. I 

 fell on one work by Lamarck and Decandolle, " La 

 Flore Francaise," which work revolutionized the course 

 of my ideas and opened a new field to my ambition 

 for new studies, a study not exactly connected to hor- 

 ticulture, but which absorbed me at once the study 

 of " wild plants," if that expression is proper, and es- 

 pecially " Cryptogamous plants." Every one who 

 knew me, when I told them my discovery of that 

 book, laughed at me, and said, in plain language, that 



