EARLY YOUTH 37 



pronounced him a botanist in the making. But 

 fate determined that he was to be a zoologist. In 

 his eleventh year the boy, while paying a visit to 

 his uncle Bleek (a professor of theology !) at Bonn, 

 spent a whole day searching the remotest corners 

 of the Siebengebirg for the Erica cinerea^ which he 

 had heard could not be found in any other part of 

 Germany. At the Merseburg school he had two 

 excellent teachers, Gandtner and Karl Gude, who 

 fostered his inclination, and changed it from a 

 mere collector's eagerness into the finer enjoyment 

 of the scientific mind. The young student wrote 

 a contribution to Garcke's Flora Hallensis. The 

 professional decision gives many a troubled hour. 



It is significant to find that as the novice tended 

 his herbarium it dawned on him that there was a 

 weak point somewhere in the rigid classification 

 given in the manuals of botany. The books said 

 that there were so many fixed species, each invari- 

 ably recognisable by certain characters. But when 

 the youth tried to diagnose his plant-treasures in 

 practice by these rules, there seemed to be always 

 a few contraband species smuggled in, like the 

 spectres in the Wahlpurgis night to which the sage 

 vainly expostulates, '^ Begone : we have explained 

 you away." Often the individual specimens would 

 not agree with the lore of the books. There were 

 discrepancies ; sometimes they cut across one type, 

 sometimes another, and at times they shamelessly 

 stretched across the gap between one rubric and 

 another. What did it mean ? Were there really 

 no fixed species? Was '* species " only an idea, 



