CHAPTER XIV 



FIRST LITERARY EFFORTS 



It was during the time that I was most occupied out of 

 doors with the observation and collection of plants that I 

 began to write down, more or less systematically, my ideas 

 on various subjects that interested me. Three of these early 

 attempts have been preserved and are now before me. They 

 all bear dates of the autumn or winter of 1843, when I was 

 between nineteen and twenty years of age. 



One of these is a rough sketch of a popular lecture on 

 Botany, addressed to an audience supposed to be as ignorant 

 as I was myself when I began to observe our native flowers. 

 I was led to write it, partly on account of the difficulties I 

 myself had felt in obtaining the kind of information I required, 

 but chiefly on account of a lecture I had attended at Neath 

 by a local botanist of some repute, and which seemed to me 

 so meagre, so uninteresting, and so utterly unlike what such 

 a lecture ought to be, that I wanted to try if I could not do 

 something better. The lecture in question consisted in an 

 enumeration of the whole series of the " Linnsean Classes and 

 Orders," stating their characters and naming a few of the 

 plants comprised in each. It was illustrated by a series of 

 coloured figures on cards about the size of ordinary playing 

 cards, which the lecturer held up one after the other to show 

 what he was talking about. The Linnasan system was upheld 

 as being far the most useful as a means of determining the 

 names of plants, and the natural system was treated as quite 

 useless for beginners, and only suited for experienced 

 botanists. 



All this was so entirely opposed to views I had already 

 formed, that I devoted a large portion of my lecture to the 



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