Early Years 



I hardly realised that there was such a science as systematic 

 botany, that every flower and every meanest and most in- 

 significant weed had been accurately described and classified, 

 and that there was any kind of system or order in the endless 

 variety of plants and animals which I knew existed^ This 

 wish to know the names of wild plants, to be able to Apeak 

 . . . about them, had arisen from a chance remark I had over- 

 heard about a year before. A lady • . • whom we knew at 

 Hertford, was talking to some friends in the street when 

 I and my father met them . . . [and] I heard the la^ say, 

 ' We found quite a rarity the other day— the Monotropa; it 

 bad not been found here before.' This I pondered over, and 

 wondered what the Monotropa was. All my father could tell 

 me was that it was a rare plant; and I thought how nice it 

 must be to know the names of rare plants when yon found 

 them."* 



One can picture the tall quiet boy going on these solitary 

 rambles, his eye becoming gradually quickened to perceive 

 new forms in nature, contrasting them one with mother, 

 and beginning to ponder over the cause which led to the 

 diverse formation and colouring of leaves apparently of the 

 same ^unily. 



It was in ISH, four years later, that he heard of, and at 

 once procured, a book publieiied at a shilling hj the S.P.CfiL 

 (the title of iHuch he could not recall in after years) , to which 

 he owed his first scientific glimmeringg of the vast tbady of 

 botany. The next step was to procure, at mneh self -samfiee, 

 Lindl^'s '^ Elements of Botany," poblidied at haK a guinea, 

 which to his immense disappointment he found of very little 

 use, as it did not deal witJi Biiiisk plants ! His disi^ipfflnt' 

 ment was lessened, however, by the loan from a Mr. Haj- 

 ward of Loudon's *^ Eneyek^edia of Plants," and it was with 

 the help of these two books tlutt he made Ids first 



