180 Joh?istd?i's Flora of Berwick upon Tweed. 



Now, there is a large class in this world of plodding, indus- 

 trious, devout worshippers of Mammon, and another class, 

 scarcely less numerous and just as irrational, of proud yet 

 shallow thinkers, who pronounce these " cullers of simples " 

 and other objects of natural history to be the idlest triflers in 

 this trifling world. Yet we, sitting on our hillock of turf, 

 *' sub tegmine fagi," and recruiting ourselves after collecting 

 our butterflies and our mosses, denounce all such judges as 

 bigoted and exclusive ; and we think we are just as well and 

 as usefully employed as he whose lofty ambition is to die 

 richer than his neighbours, or with a coronet upon his brow. 

 We lay our bodies down in peace, with other honours em- 

 blazoned upon our escutcheons. We accumulate riches, too, 

 but of another kind than gold and silver, though we have our 

 precious stones. The honoured and ennobled of our race leave 

 behind them 50,000 specimens, not pounds, collected from 

 the four corners of the earth. We lay up our treasures in 

 shelves, and cases, and cabinets, not in stocks and mortgages ; 

 and we have our treasures in heaven, too, for we have " the 

 fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, gentleness, meek- 

 ness, temperance." We are also fired with our noble ambi- 

 tions, as well as others ; and we will adduce three living ex- 

 amples, which will stand a comparison with any thing in the 

 lives of those common-place heroes, Alexander and Cassar. 

 The first is of a learned entomologist, who, hearing one 

 evening at the Linnean Society that a yellow *Scarabae'us, 

 otherwise beetle, of a very rare kind was to be captured on 

 the sands at Swansea, immediately took his seat in the mail, 

 for that place, and brought back in triumph the object of his 

 desire. The second is Mr. David Douglas, who spent two 

 years among the wild Indians of the Rocky Mountains, was 

 reduced to such extremities as occasionally to sup upon the 

 flaps of his saddle ; and once, not having this resource, was 

 obliged to eat up all the seeds he had collected the previous 

 forty days in order to appease the cravings of nature. Not 

 appalled by these sufferings, he has returned again to endure 

 similar hardships, and all for a few simples. The third ex- 

 ample is Mr. Drummond, the assistant botanist to Franklin 

 in his last hyperborean journey. In the midst of snow, with 

 the thermometer 15° below zero, without a tent, sheltered 

 from the inclemency of the weather only by a hut built of the 

 branches of trees, and depending for subsistence from day 

 to day on a solitary Indian hunter, " I obtained," says this 

 amiable and enthusiastic botanist, " a few mosses ; and, on 

 Christmas day," — mark, gentle reader, the day, of all others, 

 as if it were a reward for his devotion, — "I had the pleasure 



