74 THE SOUTH AND ITS SCIEXTH^IC SCOPE 
however, whenever my foot has touched terra firma, there is 
a sort of magic in the place that makes me grievously loth 
to quit it again. There are also pecuhar emotions attend- 
ing the seeing new countries for the first time, which are 
quite indescribable. I never felt as I did on drawing near 
Madeira and probably never shall again. Every knot that 
the ship approached called up new subjects of enquiry, and 
so it is with every new land or even every barren rock. 
It w^as the same on approaching the Cape and viewing 
Table Mountain ; I could have, and did, sit for hours 
wondering whether this knoll was covered with heaths or 
Butaceae, whether this rill produced the Wardia, or that 
rock the Andraea, where was Ludwigsberg, Wynberg, the 
tree fern and all the spots which the mind associates with 
our mutual pursuits, our friends, or our home. Selfish as 
I doubtless am and proved myself to be at home, there is 
one idea, the prosecution of which I often dream of, and 
that is, to tell, of all other persons, my father, mother, and 
brother of what I have seen ; I never view a new scene 
but I think what pleasure it will give me to view it over 
again with you all, to map to you the places where my 
specimens were gathered, to paint the views to my mother 
and to spin to Wilham the yarns of incidents that befell my 
excursions, while grandpapa and my sisters will look upon 
me as ' the Monkey that has seen the world.' 
As his field of study becomes more suggestive we see his 
work passing from the collector's individual notes to the wider 
questions of geographical distribution, so attractive to the 
range of his mind. The details become the tissue of his 
generalisations. 
The earliest botanical iinpressions de voyage for instance, at 
Madeira, overflow wath his dehght at finding the rich plant 
life, known heretofore only from books and dried specimens, 
now flourishing in semi-tropical exuberance. The experimental 
cultivation of the tea plant appeals instantly to the practical 
instinct which did so much for commercial botany in the 
years to come. So too the ' cabbage ' of Kerguelen's Land, 
an excellent food for sailors, and the Tussac, or Tussock, 
grass of the Falklands, with its prospect of acclimatisation 
