y purchasing a lens of
about 2 ft. focus at an optician's in Swansea, fixing it in a paper tube
and using the eye-piece of a small opera-glass. With it I was able to
observe the moon and Jupiter's satellites, and some of the larger
star-clusters; but, of course, very imperfectly. Yet it served to
increase my interest in astronomy, and to induce me to study with some
care the various methods of construction of the more important
astronomical instruments; and it also led me throughout my life to be
deeply interested in the grand onward march of astronomical
discovery."[2]

At the same time Wallace became attracted by, and interested in, the
flowers, shrubs and trees growing in that part of Bedfordshire, and he
acquired some elementary knowledge of zoology. "It was," he writes,
"while living at Barton that I obtained my first information that there
was such a science as geology.... My brother, like most land-surveyors,
was something of a geologist, and he showed me the fossil oysters of the
genus Gryphaea and the Belemnites ... and several other fossils which
were abundant in the chalk and gravel around Barton.... It was here,
too, that during my solitary rambles I first began to feel the influence
of nature and to wish to know more of the various flowers, shrubs and
trees I daily met with, but of which for the most part I did not even
know the English names. At that time I hardly realised that there was
such a science as systematic botany, that every flower and every meanest
and most insignificant weed had been accurately described and
classified, and that there was any kind of system or order in the
endless variety of plants and animals which I knew existed. This wish to
know the names of wild plants, to be able to speak ... about them, had
arisen from a chance remark I had overheard about a year before. A lady
... whom we knew at Hertford, was talking to some friends in the street
when I and my father met them ... [and] I heard the lady say, 'We found
quite a rarity the other day--the Monotropa; it had not been found here
before.' This I pondered over, and wondered what the Monotropa was. All
my father could tell me was that it was a rare plant; and I thought how
nice it must be to know the names of rare plants when you found
them."[3]

One can picture the tall quiet boy going on these solitary rambles, his
eye becoming gradually quickened to perceive new forms in nature,
contrasting them one with another, and beginni