110 The Ottawa Naturalist. [Sept. 



In the case of corn and potatoes, however, this method is being 

 followed with most gratifying success. 



This article is designed to correlate the practical and the 

 scientific side of plant improvement. Once the creation and 

 development of forms of plant life become associated with recog- 

 nized laws and principles, the prosaic element quickly disappears 

 and we regard these things in an entirely new light. Then it is 

 that real progress is possible. The associating of natural law 

 with the every-day industry of crop raising is the primary aim 

 of the Canadian Seed Growers' Association. 



FIELD NOTES OF CANADIAN BOTANY. I. 

 By Edward L. Greene. 



Twenty years ago I had botanized a little in the beautiful 

 woodland wilderness that then lay within an hour's walk of 

 Victoria, Vancouver Island; also at several points on the 

 British Columbian mainland, and even on the prairies of 

 Manitoba. Never, however, until this season of 1909, had I 

 done any field work in any part of the Dominion lying eastward 

 of the Great Lakes. 



Such readers of the Ottawa Naturalist as may have 

 noted my rather numerous botanical papers published herein 

 during at least a dozen years past, and may have observed that 

 these contributions were all made upon specimens communicated 

 to me by mail, supplemented by the field notes of those who 

 had sent them such readers will easily imagine that I would be 

 likely to enter upon field studies of Ontario vegetation myself 

 with keenest interest, not to say with some enthusiasm. 



It was a little before the middle of June that from Port 

 Huron, Michigan, I crossed into Ontario. Certain critical obser- 

 vations on the surpassingly rich flora of the Port Huron district 

 where my herborizings were greatly helped and furthered by 

 Mr. Charles K. Dodge, the resident botanist had induced me 

 to make my first halt within Ontario at a distance of only some 

 fifty miles to the eastward of Port Huron and Sarnia. At Sarnia, 

 just on the Canadian border, Mr. Dodge had done much field 

 work, and, as he informed me, he had once had the happiness 

 of conducting to its richest botanical garden spots, the veteran 

 Professor John Macoun. I sought, as I always prefer to do, 

 newer ground, and had fixed upon Strathroy in Middlesex as a 

 first stopping place; this without having taken counsel of any 

 one except the maker of my pocket map of Ontario, and partly 

 because I had never heard that any one had botanized there. 



