Alfred Russel Wallace 



tion of the specimens wliich he had collected and carefully 

 kept during the few preceding years. 



'' It must be remembered," he says in " My Life," " that 

 my ignorance of plants at this time was extreme. I knew 

 the wild rose, bramble, hawthorn, buttercup, poppy, daisy 

 and foxglove, and a very few others equally common. . . . 

 I knew nothing whatever as to genera and species, nor of 

 the large number of distinct forms related to each and 

 grouped into natural orders. My delight, therefore, was 

 great when I was . . . able to identify the charming little 

 eyebright, the strange-looking cow- wheat and louse- wort, 

 the handsome mullein and the pretty creeping toad-flax, 

 and to find that all of them, as well as the lordly foxglove, 

 formed parts of one great natural order, and that under 

 all their superficial diversity of form was a similarity of 

 structure which, when once clearly understood, enabled me 

 to locate each fresh species with greater ease." This, how- 

 ever, was not sufficient, and the last step was to form a 

 herbarium. 



** I soon found," he wrote, ^' that by merely identifying 

 the plants I found in my walks I lost much time in gather- 

 ing the same species several times, and even then not being 

 always quite sure that I had found the same plant before. 

 I therefore began to form a herbarium, collecting good 

 specimens and drying them carefully between drying papers 

 and a couple of boards weighted with books or stones. . . . 

 I first named the species as nearly as I could do so, and then 

 laid them out to be pressed and dried. At such times," he 

 continues — and I have quoted the passage for the sake of 

 this revealing confession — ^^ I experienced the joy which 

 every discovery of a new form of life gives to the lover of 

 nature, almost equal to those raptures which I afterwards 

 felt at every capture of new butterflies on the Amazon, or 

 at the constant stream of new species of birds, beetles 



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