possess the gift of lucid description—a gift which depends, in its turn, upon that sympathy with other minds which enables an author to see precisely what instruction is needed. Thus it often happens that, unless personal help is available, it is a matter of great difficulty for a beginner to learn the haunts of flowers, or to distinguish them when found; for when he refers to the books he finds much talk about inessential things, and little that goes directly to the point.

One might have thought that a new and strange flower would attract the eye more readily than a known one, but it is not so; the old is detected much more easily than the new. "Out of sight, out of mind," says the proverb; and conversely that which is not yet in mind will long tarry out of sight. But when once a new flower, even a rare one, has been discovered, it is curious how often it will soon be noticed afresh in another place: this, I think, must be the experience of all who have made systematic search for flowers, and it explains why the novice will frequently see but little where the expert will see much.

Not until the various initial obstacles have been overcome can one appreciate the true "call of the wild," the full pleasures of the chase. When we have learnt not only what plants are to be looked for, but those two essential conditions, the when and the where; the rule of season and of soil; the flowers that bloom in spring, in summer, or in autumn; the flowers that grow by shore, meadow, bog, river, or mountain; on chalk, limestone, sand, or clay—then the quest becomes more effective, and each successive season will add materially to our widening circle of acquaintance.

Then, too, we may begin to discard that rather vapid class of literature, the popular flower-book, which too often deals sentimentally in vague descriptions of plants, diversified with bad illustrations, and with edifying remarks about the goodness of the Creator, and may find a new and more rational interest in the published Floras of such counties or districts as have yet received that distinction. For dry though it is in form, a Flora, with its classified list of plants, and its notes collected from many sources, past and present, as to their "stations" in the county, becomes an almost romantic book of adventure, when the student can supply the details from his own knowledge, and so read with illumination "between the lines." Here, let us suppose it to be said, is a locality where grows some rare and beautiful flower, one of the prizes of the chase. What hopes and aspirations such an assurance may arouse! What encouragement to future enterprise! What regrets, it may be, for some almost forgotten omission in the past, which left that very neighbourhood unsearched! It is possible that a cold, matter-of-fact entry in a local Flora will thus throw a sudden light on some bygone expedition, and show us that if we had but taken a slightly different direction in our walk—but it is vain to lament what is irreparable!

Of such musings upon the might-have-been I can myself speak with feeling, for I was not so fortunate in my youth as to be initiated into the knowledge of flowers: it was not till much later in life, as I wandered among the Welsh and English mountains, that the scales fell from my eyes, and looking on the beauty of the saxifrages I realized what glories I had missed. Thus I was compelled to put myself to school, so to speak, and to make a study of wildflowers with the aid of such books as were available, a process which, like a botanical Jude the Obscure, I found by no means easy. The self-educated man, we know, is apt to be perverse and opinionated; so I trust my readers will make due allowance if they notice such faults in this book. I can truly plead, as the illiterate do, that "I'm no scholar, more's the pity." But it was my friends and acquaintances—those, at least, who had some botanical knowledge—who were the chief sufferers during this period of inquiry; and, looking back, I often marvel at the patience with which they endured the problems with which I confronted them. I remember waylaying my friend, W. J. Jupp, a very faithful flower-lover, with some mutilated and unrecognizable labiate plant which I thought might be calamint, and how tactfully he suggested that my conjecture was "near enough." On another occasion it was Edward Carpenter, the Sage of Millthorpe, or Wild Sage, as some botanical friend once irreverently described him, who volunteered to assist me, by means of a scientific book which shows, by an unerring process, how to eliminate the wrong flowers, until at the end you are left with the right one duly named. All through the list we went; but there must have been a slip somewhere; for in the conclusion one thing alone was clear—that whatever my plant might be, it was not that which the scientific book indicated. Of all my friends and helpers, Bertram Lloyd, whose acquaintance with wildflowers is unusually large, and to whom, in all that pertains to natural history, I am as the "gray barbarian" (vide Tennyson) to "the Christian child," was the most constant and long-suffering: he solved many of my enigmas, and introduced me to some of his choicest flower-haunts among the Chiltern Hills. In the course of my researches I was sometimes referred for guidance to persons who were known in their respective home-circles as "the botanists of the family," a title which I found was not quite equivalent to that of "the complete botanist." There was one "botanist of the family" who was visibly embarrassed when I asked her the name of a plant that is common on the chalk hills, but is so carelessly described in the books as to be easily confused with other kindred species. She gazed at it long, with a troubled eye, and then, as if feeling that her domestic reputation must at all hazards be upheld, replied firmly: "Hemp-nettle." Hemp-nettle it was not; it was wild basil; but years after, when I began to have similar questions put to myself, I realized how disconcerting it is to be thus suddenly interrogated. It made me understand why Cabinet Ministers so frequently insist that they must have "notice of that Question." With one complete botanist, however, I was privileged to become acquainted, Mr. C. E. Salmon, whose special diocese, so to speak, is the county of Surrey, but whose intimate knowledge of wildflowers extends to many counties and coasts. Not a few favours did I receive from him, in certifying for me some of the more puzzling plants; and very good-naturedly he bore the disappointment when, on his asking me to send him, for his Flora of Surrey, a list of the rarer flowers in the neighbourhood where I was living, I included among them the small bur-parsley (caucalis daucoides), a vanished native, a prodigal son of the county, whose return would have been a matter for gladness. But alas, my plant was not a caucalis at all, but a torilis, a squat weed of the cornfields, which by its superficial resemblance to its rare cousin had grossly imposed upon my ignorance. It is when he has acquired some familiarity with the ordinary British plants that a flower-lover, thus educated late in life, finds his thoughts turning to the vanished opportunities of the past. I used to speculate regretfully on what I had missed in my early wanderings in wild places; as in the Isle of Skye, where I picked up the eagle's feather, but overlooked the mountain flower; or on Ben Lawers, a summit rich in rare Alpines to which I then was stone-blind; or in a score of other localities which I can scarcely hope to revisit. But time, which heals all things, brought me a sort of compensation for these delinquencies; for with a fuller