422 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY cHAP. 



not only a convenient ambulatory, but, with its 

 growing flowers and trees, became a novel and 

 intense pleasure, until he began "to think with 

 CandiJe that ' Cultivons notre jardin ' comprises the 

 whole duty of man." 



It was strange that this interest should have 

 come suddenly at the end of his life. Though he 

 had won the prize in Lindley's botanical class, he had 

 never been a field botanist till he was attracted by 

 the Swiss gentians. As has been said before, his 

 love of nature had never run to collecting either 

 plants or animals. Mere "spider-hunters and hay- 

 naturalists," as a German friend called them, he was 

 inchned to regard as the camp-followers of science. 

 It was the engineering side of nature, the unity of plan 

 of animal construction, worked out in infinitely varying 

 detail, which engrossed him. Walking once with 

 Hooker in the Rhone valley, where the grass was 

 alive with red and green grasshoppers, he said, "I 

 would give anything to be as interested in them as 

 you are." 



But this feeling, unknown to him before, broke 

 out in his gentian work. He told Hooker, "I can't 

 express the delight I have in them." It continued 

 undiminished when once he settled in the new house 

 and laid out a garden. His especial love was for the 

 rockery of Alpines, many of which came from Sir J. 

 Hooker. 



Here, then, he threw himself into gardening with 

 characteristic ardour. He described his position as a 



