had arisen from a chance remark I had overheard about a year before.  A lady ... whom we knew at Hertford, was talking to some friends in the street when I and my father met them ... [and] I heard the lady say, ’We found quite a rarity the other day—­the Monotropa; it had not been found here before.’  This I pondered over, and wondered what the Monotropa was.  All my father could tell me was that it was a rare plant; and I thought how nice it must be to know the names of rare plants when you found them."[3]

One can picture the tall quiet boy going on these solitary rambles, his eye becoming gradually quickened to perceive new forms in nature, contrasting them one with another, and beginning to ponder over the cause which led to the diverse formation and colouring of leaves apparently of the same family.

It was in 1841, four years later, that he heard of, and at once procured, a book published at a shilling by the S.P.C.K. (the title of which he could not recall in after years), to which he owed his first scientific glimmerings of the vast study of botany.  The next step was to procure, at much self-sacrifice, Lindley’s “Elements of Botany,” published at half a guinea, which to his immense disappointment he found of very little use, as it did not deal with British plants!  His disappointment was lessened, however, by the loan from a Mr. Hayward of London’s “Encyclopedia of Plants,” and it was with the help of these two books that he made his first classification of the specimens which 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, however, 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 gathering 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