"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 so, and then laid them out to be pressed and dried. At such times," he continues--and I have quoted the passage for the sake of this revealing confession--"I experienced the joy which every discovery of a new form of life gives to the lover of nature, almost equal to those raptures which I afterwards felt at every capture of new butterflies on the Amazon, or at the constant stream of new species of birds, beetles and butterflies in Borneo, the Moluccas, and the Aru Islands."[4] Anything in the shape of gardening papers and catalogues which came in his way was eagerly read, and to this source he owed his first interest in the fascinating orchid. "A catalogue published by a great nurseryman in Bristol ... contained a number of tropical orchids, of whose wonderful variety and beauty I had obtained some idea from the woodcuts in Loudon's 'Encyclopedia.' The first epiphytal orchid I ever saw was at a flower show in Swansea ... which caused in me a thrill of enjoyment which no other plant in the show produced. My interest in this wonderful order of plants was further enhanced by reading in the _Gardener's Chronicle_ an article by Dr. Lindley on one of the London flower shows, where there was a good display of orchids, in which ... he added, 'and _Dendrobium Devonianum_, too delicate and beautiful for a flower of earth.' This and other references ... gave them, in my mind, a weird and mysterious charm ... which, I believe, had its share in producing that longing for the tropics which a few years later was satisfied in the equatorial forests of the Amazon."[5]