I9IO. Samuel Alexander Stewaji. 205 



II, His Work. 



Among those whose lives have gone to the building up of 

 natural history in Ireland, the figure of Samuel Alexander 

 Stewart stands unique. And this is not only because, handi- 

 capped from the start as regards both education and position 

 in the world, he won for himself a foremost place among 

 Irish naturalists, and left behind him valuable printed 

 memorials of his researches in the field. The man was greater 

 than his work, and to those who had the privilege of his 

 friendship what will be best remembered will be his unassum- 

 ing modesty, his helpful courtesy to those especially who were 

 young, or beginners in the studies of which he was master ; 

 his whole-souled striving after the truth, and his impatience 

 with what seemed to him to be slip-shod or incompetent work. 

 Of " the strife for triumph more than truth " he was incapable. 



Stewart's love of investigation began early. He has told 

 me how, landing in Belfast from Philadelphia at the age of 11, 

 he looked with surprise at the dark hills towering over the 

 west end of the town, and on the very first morning started 

 off to scale them, unable to believe that those summits were 

 really some miles awa}^ In the same practical spirit, when 

 as a young man, his scientific interest was first aroused by 

 reading Hugh Miller's " Old Red Sandstone," he crossed the 

 channel and set off on foot armed with a hammer to search in 

 the Devonian rocks of Scotland for the strange fishes of 

 which he had read. It was the natural history classes held in 

 i860 and the succeeding years by J. Bete Jukes and Ralph 

 Tate, under the Science and Art Department, and the found- 

 ing of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club in 1863, when 

 Stewart was 37 years of age, that brought him to the front in 

 the local scientific circle. He was on the Club Committee 

 from the beginning, and to the second indoor meeting of 

 the Club, on 19th November, 1863, he contributed his first paper, 

 '- On the occurrence of some rare or little known Plants in 

 the Belfast district." The same session he carried off first 

 prize for a collection of Phanerogamia, and in the succeeding 

 year a prize for the best collection of local plants not mentioned 

 in Tate's Flora Belfasiiensis, which had been published in the 

 meantime. A second paper on the same subject followed in 

 1865. Another paper read in 1868, "A run through Galway 



