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 

 " Linnaean Classes and Orders," stating their characters and 

 naming a few of the plants comprised in each. It was illus- 

 trated 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 

 Linnaean 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. 



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