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.
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