356 
complied with the request of his letter. But that letter initiated a - 
warm friendship between us and association in work upon Ameri- 
can ‘ferns; which has continued to the present time. - During 
these twenty-three years of botanical travel on my part my hands 
have gathered all but 36 of the 165 species of North American 
ferns, and from the more remote corners of our continent I have 
sent home to my friend for description and publication 16 new 
‘ones. Yet I trust that the fern hunt upon which he started me 
in 1873 is still far from its close. 
After those strange gardens of boreal plants, Willoughby 
Mountain and Smuggler’s Notch, had yielded up their treas- 
ures we began to search the State to find other places offering 
plants peculiar conditions. We enquired first for mountain preci- 
pices, which, swept by unobstructed cataracts of cold air from 
high summits, would maintain in a measure the conditions of 
higher latitudes. I recollect having in my boyhood looked down 
from the verge of Checkerberry Ledge in Bakersfield upon the 
forest occupying the narrow valley below, and remembered it as 
a dizzy height. I could not rest till I could find an opportunity, 
June 16, 1880, to explore the base of its cliff. But after the fear- 
ful precipices of our higher mountains the place was disappointing 
and tame; only Woodsia glabella and a rare lichen rewarded my 
search. 
People had told me of Hazen’s Notch and its cliff, on the road 
between Montgomery and Lowell; and the following morning 
our good friend, Mr. Fassett, of Enosburgh, was conducting me 
there. This cliff was found to be of but moderate altitude and 
to have besides a warm southern exposure. Here Saxifraga 
Aizoon Jacq. was growing in greater abundance than I had any- 
where previously seen; nothing else of interest. 
It is only of phaenogams and ferns that I have yet spoken; it 
was not alone my duty between 1874 and 1880 to collect these, 
but all the lower orders as well. Charles James Sprague, of Bos- 
ton, was then accumulating an herbarium of lichens for presenta- 
tion to the Boston Natural History Society, and he set me to col- 
lect lichens diligently, wherever I went. If Smuggler’s Notch 
offered the rarest of flowering plants, it yielded lichens no less 
rare—stragglers left behind, when the species retreated to the 
