higher classes together in order to have them inspect and clean the herbarium. Small worms had been found—book-worms. The director did not seem to have much confidence in my help, for he left only a few leaves for me. I know to this day that there were crucifers on them. My interest in botany was never very great. At my preliminary examination in botany, I was required to identify a crucifer, and did not recognise it. I would have fared badly if my theoretical knowledge had not helped me out. Crucifers suggest composites. The artichoke is really a composite, and the one which I might call my favourite flower. My wife, who is more thoughtful than I, often brings this favourite flower of mine home from the market.
I see the monograph which I have written lying before me. This, too, is not without its reference. The friend whom I pictured wrote to me yesterday from Berlin: "I think a great deal about your dream book. I see it lying before me finished, and am turning over its leaves." How I envied him this prophetic power! If I could only see it lying already finished before me!
The folded Coloured Plate.—While I was a student of medicine, I suffered much from a fondness for studying in monographs exclusively. In spite of my limited means, I subscribed to a number of the medical archives, in which the coloured plates gave me much delight. I was proud of this inclination for thoroughness. So, when I began to publish on my own account, I had to draw the plates for my own treatises, and I remember one of them turned out so badly that a kindly-disposed colleague ridiculed me for it. This suggests, I don't know exactly how, a very early memory from my youth. My father once thought it would be a joke to hand over a book with coloured plates (Description of a Journey in Persia) to me and my eldest sister for destruction. This was hardly to be justified from an educational point of view. I was at the time five years old, and my sister three, and the picture of our blissfully tearing this book to pieces (like an artichoke, I must add, leaf by leaf) is almost the only one from this time of life which has remained fresh in my memory. When I afterwards became a student, I developed a distinct fondness for collecting and possessing books (an analogy to the inclination for studying from mono-
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