Page:Allan Octavian Hume, C.B.; Father of the Indian National Congress.djvu/129

 He explained that upon principle he never purchased plants gathered in Britain, because such a practice some- times led to the extirpation of rare species, and I quite accorded with his views in that respect.

"I was then engaged in business in the City of London, but from April to October in that year I devoted every Saturday afternoon, and frequently the whole of Sunday, and each of the bank holidays, exclusively to collecting plants for Mr. Hume. At this time I was also the honorary secretary of a natural history society which, in co-operation with a few friends, I had assisted in forming in 1897. At the end of October 1900, my health broke down, and I was the recipient of much kindness and help from Mr. Hume until, in the spring of 1901, my strength was somewhat restored, when he engaged me as his botanical assistant.

"I had been accustomed to botanize in the country ' Darwin resided during the last forty years of his life ; and in April 1901 I took Mr. Hume to certain spots at Down and in the Vale of Cudham, which had been Dr. Darwin's haunts and where he obtained many of the plants men- tioned in his famous work on *The Fertilization of Orchids.' In the same month I also accompanied him to Saffron Walden, in Essex, to collect specimens of Primula elatior, a plant which in England grows only upon the chalky boulder-clay. Our only information was that it grew somewhere to the north-west of the railway station, and we proceeded along a road in that direction. I had for many years devoted attention to geology, and perceiving on a roadside bank of clay some worn fragments of rock which I knew were foreign to Essex, I pointed them out to Mr. Hume, with the remark: 'We are on the boulder-clay. Those stones were brought here by ice.'
 * about the village of Down, in Kent, where the late Dr.