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

SELF-EDUCATION IN SCIENCE, ETC. 107often more truly beneficial than those which weshould consider more favourable. Sometimes theyonly aid in the formation of character ; sometimesthey also lead to action which gives scope for the useof what might have been dormant or unused faculties(as, I think, has occurred in my own case) ; but muchmore frequently they seem to us wholly injurious,leading to a life of misery or crime, and turning whatin themselves are good faculties to evil purposes.When this occurs in any large number of cases, asit certainly does with us now, we may be sure thatit is the system of society that is at fault, and themost strenuous efforts of all who see this should bedevoted, not to the mere temporary alleviation of theevils due to it, but to the gradual modification of thesystem itself. This is my present view. At the timeof which I am now writing, I had not begun even tothink of these matters, although facts which I nowsee to be of great importance in connection with themwere being slowly accumulated for use in after-years.It was during the time that I was most occupiedout of doors with the observation and collection ofplants that I began to write down, more or lesssystematically, my ideas on various subjects thatinterested me. Three of these early attempts havebeen preserved and are now before me. They allbear dates of the autumn or winter of 1843, when Iwas between nineteen and twenty years of age.One of these is a rough sketch of a popular lectureon Botany, addressed to an audience supposed to beas ignorant as I was myself when I began to observeour native flowers. I was led to write it, partly onaccount of the difficulties I myself had felt in obtainingthe kind of information I required, but chiefly onaccount of a lecture I had attended at Neath by a