SKETCH OF THOMAS NUTTALL. 695 



ceived the naturalist at some distance, quietly examining a speci- 

 men. He hailed him with signs to return quickly. "We are 

 going to have a brush with the Indians," said his friend ; " is your 

 gun in good order ? " Alas ! the gun had been freely used to up- 

 root plants, and was filled with earth to the muzzle. Had Nuttall 

 fired it in this condition it would inevitably have burst in his 

 hands and killed or severely wounded him. 



On his journey to the Pacific the caravan separated into two 

 parties to cross the Rocky Mountains by different routes. One of 

 the parties had the good fortune to meet with plenty of buffalo 

 cows, upon whose meat they became fat. The other, to which 

 Nuttall belonged, suffered much from fatigue, and found scarcely 

 anything to eat except a few lean grizzly bears. When the parties 

 reunited, Nuttall had lost so much flesh that his old companions 

 could scarcely recognize him. Upon one of these expressing his 

 surprise at the great change in his appearance, he heaved a sigh 

 of inanition and retorted, " Yes, indeed, you would have been just 

 as thin as myself if, like me, you had lived for two weeks upon 

 old Ephraim (grizzly bear), and on short allowance of that too ! " 



At Christmas, 1841, Nuttall returned to England, where he re- 

 sided for the remaining seventeen years of his life. An uncle 

 who had prospered in business, having no family of his own, be- 

 queathed to him an estate called Nutgrove, in the neighborhood 

 of Liverpool. A condition attached to the bequest was that Nut- 

 tall should reside in England at least nine months of the year for 

 the rest of his life. He had been thirty-four years in the United 

 States and become much attached to this country, so that, although 

 he had visited England in 1811 and 1822, returning to reside per- 

 manently in the land of his birth seemed to him like going into 

 exile. He therefore hesitated for some time to accept the inherit- 

 ance, but consideration for his sisters and their families finally in- 

 duced him to take it. Becoming a British landed proprietor did 

 not make Mr. Nuttall wealthy. The Nutgrove estate was encum- 

 bered with annuities, besides which there was a heavy income tax 

 to pay. Dr. Pickering and other American friends who visited him 

 found him living in the fashion of a plain farmer, working and 

 eating with his men like one of them. But his interest in botany 

 was not allowed to die out. He made use of the opportunity which 

 the possession of ample grounds afforded for the cultivation of 

 rare plants, especially rhododendrons, which his nephew, Mr. 

 Thomas J. Booth, brought him from the mountains of Assam and 

 Butan. Various new species of these were described by him in 

 British scientific journals. . -, j 



Shortly before leaving the United States Nuttall was mduced 

 to write a supplement to Michaux's Sylva in three volumes. In 

 the beautifully written preface to the work his own wanderings 



