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to be an intelligent auditor or critic. His specialties were the 
higher plants, fungi, and insects, of all which he had made considerable 
collections. : : 
In personal qualities Mr. Ruger exhibited a rare union of “ sweet- 
ness and light.” He was as simple and unaffected as nature herself, 
and a stranger to envy and malice. No one ever knew him to utter 
an unkind word or an uncharitable judgment. He was generous 
and sympathetic; and he loved to impart his knowledge to others, 
and to share with them his botanical treasures. These kindly and 
noble qualities specially endeared him to the members of the Torrey 
Botanical Club, of which he had been long an officer, and of which 
he was one of the most constant, devoted and zealous members. He 
was for years the chief organizer and leader of its excursions in the 
field, and was always ready with hand and brain to serve in its inter- 
ests. One of his last acts was the gift of nearly a hundred species to 
its Herbarium, and within a few days of his death he also mounted 
some specimens for its use. 
It was the same warm and generous sympathy directed towards 
the young, the poor and the unprotected of the region in which he 
lived, that gave him so deep an interest in the Sunday school mission 
work of the church with which he was connected, and to which for 
many years he rendered constant and valuable service. From the 
same kindly nature also he had long been accustomed to prepare and 
to dispense without charge vegetable medicines to the poor about 
him, so that he had come to be commonly known and addressed in 
his neighborhood as Dr. or Prof. Ruger,—a title, however, which he 
never acknowledged or allowed himself to use. And at the time of 
his death he had prepared a considerable part of the sheets of a work 
on the Botany of our medicinal plants, and their properties, with 
drawings, designed for publication. 
As a botanist, Mr. Ruger excelled in a familiar and exact knowl- 
edge of our native Flora. He had himself gathered almost every- 
thing that grows in our fields and woods, especially in the western 
part of Long Island; and to his observations the BULLETIN is much 
indebted in its early notes and local catalogue. He also exchanged 
extensively with botanists throughout the country, and was so care- 
ful and just in his returns that exchanges with him were widely 
sought and continued. 
Through the practical and extensive knowledge of plants thus 
acquired, and an extraordinary memory, which seemed never to for- 
get a plant once seen and known, he became the “ walking encyclo- 
pedia”’ of the Club, and was scarcely ever at fault in naming at a 
glance any of the ordinary species east of the Mississippi, besides 
being largely acquainted with the more western species, 
_ His love of plants was genuine and impartial. He found interest 
in everything that grows. The homeliest weed was to him never 
“vile ”’—an epithet which unworthily, as it seems to us, but not unfre- 
quently, is applied in Gray’s Manual to many of our humbler floral 
denizens ; and the advent of Amarantus crispus or Chenopodium 
Vulvaria was greeted by him with almost as much apparent interest 
as the discovery of a new orchid would have been. 
