In Recognizing The Plants Pointed Out In My First Medical Book,
That Extraordinary Old Work On Astrological Medicine, Culpeper's "Herbal",
I Had The Guidance Of A Book On The Plants Of Lanarkshire, By Patrick.
Limited As My Time Was, I Found Opportunities To Scour The Whole Country-Side,
"Collecting Simples".
Deep and anxious were my studies
on the still deeper and more perplexing profundities of astrology,
and I believe I got as far into that abyss of phantasies as my author said
he dared to lead me.
It seemed perilous ground to tread on farther,
for the dark hint seemed to my youthful mind to loom toward
"selling soul and body to the devil", as the price of the unfathomable
knowledge of the stars. These excursions, often in company with brothers,
one now in Canada, and the other a clergyman in the United States,
gratified my intense love of nature; and though we generally returned
so unmercifully hungry and fatigued that the embryo parson shed tears,
yet we discovered, to us, so many new and interesting things,
that he was always as eager to join us next time as he was the last.
On one of these exploring tours we entered a limestone quarry -
long before geology was so popular as it is now. It is impossible to describe
the delight and wonder with which I began to collect the shells found in
the carboniferous limestone which crops out in High Blantyre and Cambuslang.
A quarry-man, seeing a little boy so engaged, looked with that pitying eye
which the benevolent assume when viewing the insane.
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