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grouped into natural orders. My delight, therefore, was great when I was now 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 there was a similarity of structure which, when once clearly understood, enabled me to locate each fresh species with greater ease. The Crucifers, the Pea tribe, the Umbelliferæ, the Compositæ, and the Labiates offered great difficulties, and it was only after repeated efforts that I was able to name with certainty a few of the species, after which each additional discovery became a little less difficult, though the time I gave to the study before I left England was not sufficient for me to acquaint myself with more than a moderate proportion of the names of the species I collected.

Now, I have some reason to believe that this was the turning-point of my life, the tide that carried me on, not to fortune but to whatever reputation I have acquired, and which has certainly been to me a never-failing source of much health of body and supreme mental enjoyment. If my brother had had constant work for me so that I never had an idle day, and if I had continued to be similarly employed after I became of age, I should most probably have become entirely absorbed in my profession, which, in its various departments, I always found extremely interesting, and should therefore not have felt the need of any other occupation or study.

I know now, though I was ignorant of it at the time, that my brother's life was a very anxious one, that the difficulty of finding remunerative work was very great, and that he was often hard pressed to earn enough to keep us both in the very humble way in which we lived. He never alluded to this that I can remember, nor did I ever hear how much our board and lodging cost him, nor ever saw him make the weekly or monthly payments. During the seven years I was with him I hardly ever had more than a few shillings for

personal expenses; but every year or two, when I went home, what new clothes were absolutely necessary were provided for me, with perhaps ten shillings or a pound as pocketmoney till my next visit, and this, I think, was partly or wholly paid out of the small legacy left me by my grandfather. This seemed very hard at the time, but I now see clearly that even this was useful to me, and was really an important factor in moulding my character and determining my work in life. Had my father been a moderately rich man and had supplied me with a good wardrobe and ample pocket-money; had my brother obtained a partnership in some firm in a populous town or city, or had established himself in his profession, I might never have turned to nature as the solace and enjoyment of my solitary hours, my whole life would have been differently shaped, and though I should, no doubt, have given some attention to science, it seems very unlikely that I should have ever undertaken what at that time seemed rather a wild scheme, a journey to the almost unknown forests of the Amazon in order to observe nature and make a living by collecting. All this may have been pure chance, as I long thought it was, but of late years I am more inclined to Hamlet's belief, when he said

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”

Of course, I do not adopt the view that each man's life, in all its details, is guided by the Deity for His special ends. That would be, indeed, to make us all conscious automata, puppets in the hands of an all-powerful destiny. But, as I shall show later on, I have good reasons for the belief that, just as our own personal influence and expressed or unseen guidance is a factor in the life and conduct of our children, and even of some of our friends and acquaintances, so we are surrounded by a host of unseen friends and relatives who have gone before us, and who have certain limited powers of influencing, and even, in particular cases, almost of determining, the actions of living persons, and may thus in a great variety of indirect ways modify the circumstances and character of

any one or more individuals in whom they are specially interested. But a great number of these occurrences in every one's life are apparently what we term chance, and even if all are so, the conclusion I wish to lay stress upon is not affected. It is, that many of the conditions and circumstances that constitute our environment, though at the time they may seem unfortunate or even unjust, yet are often more truly beneficial than those which we should consider more favourable. Sometimes they only aid in the formation of character; sometimes they also lead to action which gives scope for the use of what might have been dormant or unused faculties (as, I think, has occurred in my own case); but much more frequently they seem to us wholly injurious, leading to a life of misery or crime, and turning what in themselves are good faculties to evil purposes. When this occurs in any large number of cases, as it certainly does with us now, we may be sure that it is the system of society that is at fault, and the most strenuous efforts of all who see this should be devoted, not to the mere temporary alleviation of the evils due to it but to the gradual modification of the system itself. This is my present view. At the time of which I am now writing, I had not begun even to think of these matters, although facts which I now see to be of great importance in connection with them were being slowly accumulated for use in after years.

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 "Linnæan 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 Linnæan 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 question of classification in general, showed that any classification, however artificial, was better than none, and that Linnæus made a great advance when he substituted generic and specific names for the short Latin descriptions of species before used, and by classifying all known plants by means of a few well-marked and easily observed characters. I then showed how and why this classification was only occasionally, and as it were accidentally, a natural one; that in a vast number of cases it grouped together plants which were essentially unlike each other; and that for all purposes, except the naming of species, it was both useless and inconvenient. I then showed what the natural system of classification really was, what it aimed at, and the much greater interest it gave to the study of botany. I explained the principles on which the various natural orders were founded, and showed how often they gave us a clue to the properties of large groups of species, and enabled us to detect real affinities under very diverse external forms.

I concluded by passing in review some of the best marked orders as illustrating these various features. Although crudely written and containing some errors, I still think it would serve as a useful lecture to an audience generally ignorant of the whole subject, such as the young mechanics of a manufacturing town. Its chief interest to me now is, that it shows my early bent towards classification, not the highly elaborate type that seeks to divide and subdivide under different headings with technical names, rendering the whole scheme difficult to comprehend, and being in most cases a hindrance rather than an aid to the learner, but a simple and intelligible classification which recognizes and defines all great natural groups, and does not needlessly multiply them on account of minute technical differences. It has always seemed to me that the natural orders of flowering plants afford one of the best, if not the very best, example of such a classification.

It is this attraction to classification, not as a metaphysically

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