My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

104 MY LIFEthen to take long walks over the mountains with mycollecting-box, which I brought home full of treasures.I first named the species as nearly as I could do so,and then laid them out to be pressed and dried. Atsuch times I experienced the joy which every discoveryof a new form of life gives to the lover of nature, almostequal to those raptures which I afterwards felt at everycapture of new butterflies on the Amazon, or at the constantstream of new species of birds, beetles, and butterfliesin Borneo, the Moluccas, and the Aru Islands.It must be remembered that my ignorance of plantsat this time was extreme. I knew the wild rose,bramble, hawthorn, buttercup, poppy, daisy, and foxglove,and a very few others equally common andpopular, and this was all. I knew nothing whateveras to genera and species, nor of the large numbers ofdistinct forms related to each other and grouped intonatural orders. My delight, therefore, was great whenI was now able to identify the charming little eyebright,the strange-looking cow-wheat and louse-wort,the handsome mullein and the pretty creeping toadflax,and to find that all of them, as well as the lordlyfoxglove, formed parts of one great natural order, andthat under all their superficial diversity of form therewas a similarity of structure which, when once clearlyunderstood, enabled me to locate each fresh specieswith greater ease.The Crucifers, the Pea tribe, theUmbelliferae, the Compositae, and the Labiates offeredgreat difficulties, and it was only after repeated effortsthat I was able to name with certainty a few of thespecies, after which each additional discovery becamea little less difficult, though the time I gave to thestudy before I left England was not sufficient for meto acquaint myself with more than a moderate proportionof the names of the species I collected.