His parents had thought of placing the boy with an eminent chemist in London, but his obvious antipathy to the prospect of city life led to his entering his father's office in Limerick instead. The quiet home life which ensued was well suited to his taste. All holidays were devoted to collecting. The family had a summer residence at Miltown Malbay, on the Atlantic coast, an excellent spot for Algae; and it was no doubt the time spent there that brought these plants prominently under his notice, and led to the noteworthy researches of later days. For the time, Mollusca still mainly occupied his mind, and in 1829, at eighteen years of age, we find him busily engaged in drawing the plates for a _Testacea Hibernica_--a book that never saw the light, though two years later he writes of being at work on his _Bivalvia Hibernica_, which was then half finished. In the same year, he made his first excursion into "foreign parts" as he calls them, visiting Dublin, Liverpool, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. An account of a meeting of the Linnean Society, to which he was taken by his friend Bicheno, then secretary, and at which "if not edified I was amused," shows that the reverence he felt for science did not necessarily extend to constituted scientific authority. "The President wore a three-cocked hat of ample dimensions, and sat in a crimson arm-chair in great state. I saw a number of new Fellows admitted. They were marched one by one to the president, who rose, and taking them by the hand, admitted them. The process costs _£_25."