351 i 
holidays when a school boy at Hinesburgh and Bakersfield and 
Dunham, 
After some years devoted rather to the culture than to the col- 
lecting of plants, it was membership in the Massachusetts Horti- 
cultural Society which brought me in touch with the botanists of 
Boston and Cambridge. This was in 1873. Twenty years had 
elapsed since the publication by Thomson of Oakes’ catalogue of 
Vermont plants, with Professor Torrey’s appendix. During this 
time little seems to have been done towards enlarging these lists 
of Vermont plants. The young Horace Mann, shortly before 
wandering away to die in the Sandwich Islands, had visited Mount 
Mansfield, and there, in the little tarn which we call the Lake of 
the Clouds, had found and communicated to Dr. Englemann Jso- 
etes echinospora Durieu var. Braunii Engelm. John H. Redfield, 
from the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, had brought, June 15, 
1869, from the highest peak of the same mountain, as a memento 
of his visit, Diapensia Lapponiwca L. But these, and such as they, 
seem to have come and passed as summer tourists. J. W. Cong- 
don, Esq., now of Mariposa, California, then of East Greenwich, 
R. I, was something more than this when, on visits to the native 
place of his wife at Lyndonville, he diligently made collections of 
the rarer plants of that part of the State, including Willoughby 
Mountain. Yet I can call to mind but a single addition made to 
Oakes’ catalogue by that gentleman, Scirpus paucifiorus Lightf., now 
known as Eleocharis pauciflora Watson. Charles C. Frost, the 
learned shoemaker of Brattleboro, remained as the one Vermont 
botanist, and he was still active, but so absorbed in the mysteries 
of cryptogams that he was forgetting the names of our common 
weeds; and the hills within view from his home were competent 
to supply him with abundant material for his studies to the end of 
his life. The times yielded me an opportunity and I was ready to 
grasp it, was fitted by possession of leisure and strength and taste, 
or absorbing passion, to follow out the task set me. There was at 
that time a want, even in the best old herbaria, of good specimens 
of the more interesting plants which had been found in Vermont 
from the days of Michaux and Pursh to those of Torrey and Frost. 
New herbaria were being founded, which lacked them altogether. — 
So I was sent out on quests for these treasures. Mr, Congdon, — 
