260 The Ottawa Naturalist. 



of the best things around you a large variety of plants can be got by 

 exchange, and the pleasure and profit in making a collection is largely 

 due to the intercourse thus brought about with those of kindred tastes. 

 Nor is this confined to those in your own country ; it is often 

 necessary to have certain specimens from other regions, and you arc 

 thus brought into correspondence with scientists in all parts of the 

 world. Let your specimens be well made, and never send away a poor 

 one unless it be of something very rare. A man soon becomes known 

 by his exchanges, and if his specimens are poor he is made the subject 

 of much unpleasant criticism and will in time be avoided by all good 

 collectors. Always preserve the choicest specimen collected for your 

 own herbarium, but alter this send the best you have to the first 

 correspondent who asks for it. Keep even a fragment of any species 

 not represented in your collection until you get a better, but of your 

 duplicates destroy any too poor to send away. Do not hoard up 

 duplicates. The mm who studies science for science sake would 

 sooner give away every specimen for nothing than allow them to remain 

 buried like a miser's ^old. Make sure that all plants you send are 

 correctly named, and notify your correspondent whether they are 

 poisoned or not. Never promise a plant unless you actually have it or 

 are positively certain of being able to get it, and keep a catalogue of 

 your duplicates that you may be prepared at all times to answer a brother 

 collector who applies for anything. 



The last stage in botanical study, and the one to which all the 

 others should be stepping-stones, is the woiking out of some of the 

 many unsolved problems of plant life by independent and intelligent 

 observation and experiment. The breadth of the field for exploration by 

 original observation isimmense,as comparatively little is knownof thelaws 

 governing many of the phenomenaof plants. Forexamplejittleisknown 

 of the hosts of some of our parasitic plants, and in some cases it is even 

 dispute. I whether certain plants, commonly considered such, are 

 parasites ,it all : though all plants move more or less, wc possess scanty 

 knowledge of the nature of this movement in many of them, and still 

 less of its object ; wc know that cross-fertilization is generally necessary 

 lor the production of perfect seed, but in many cases we do not know 



