These little scruples, however, did not interfere with what he felt to be the chief interest of botany. The collecting of plants harmonises well with a general love of nature and a passion for wandering over hill and valley. Long walks had already become a feature of his life. The scientific interest made it superfluous to have a companion. Botany went with him everywhere as his lady-love, and remained ever faithful to him. “I have preferred to travel alone most of my life,” he used to say to me; “I never feel _ennui_ when I am alone. My love of and interest in nature are much better entertainment than conversation.” One of the features in this interest at all times, even in later years, was botanical research. The material for it is found everywhere. Darwin, a great traveller with an unusually strong appreciation of good scenery, has said that the traveller who would combine the pursuit of knowledge with æsthetic satisfaction must be above all a botanist(in the closing retrospect of his _Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World_, one of the finest passages in the work). Whenever Haeckel spoke in later years of his adopted Jena, he never failed to explain, amongst the other excellent qualities of the little university town, that so many fine orchids grew in its woods. When he left Jena to make the long voyage to Ceylon, his last look was at the drops of dew that sparkled like pearls “in the dark blue calices of the gentians, with their tender lashes, that so richly decked the grass-covered sides of the railway cutting.” The _Letters from India_, that described his voyage, owes a good deal of its peculiar charm to his skill in botanical description. I know no other work that approaches it in conveying so effective an idea of the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics. In those early years there was one particular point of close union between botany and the sense of beauty. It was only two years before Haeckel’s birth that Goethe, the man who had put into inimitable verse new and pregnant truths of botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.