iqoo] Morrison-:-Kentucky Coffee Tree. 119 



time searching for them, but failed to find them. On August 7th 

 this year I went there determined if there were any of them grow- 

 ing in the locality to find them, and after some time spent in a 

 most careful search I was rewarded by finding on a plat of ground 

 not more than one hundred feet square about fifty specimens. 

 About a dozen will average from three and a half to four and a 

 half inches in diameter and twenty-five feet high. There are some 

 fifteen or sixteen others from one inch and a half to two and a 

 half in diameter and ten to twelve feet high ; the others are from 

 one foot to four feet in height, and there are some six or eight 

 stumps averaging six inches in diameter where the largest ones in 

 the group have been cut down. 



They grow upon a little knoll on the edge or rather in the 

 midst of a swampy piece of ground about a quarter of a mile west 

 of the River Sydenham and within half a mile of the northern 

 boundary of Kent County, or on the old maps of twenty-five years 

 ago within the southern boundary of Lambton. I searched care- 

 fully to find traces of a parent tree from which they might have 

 come but failed. That they are native and not planted I am satis- 

 fied. I conversed with a member of the family on whose farm 

 they grow ; she has lived there for many years and her father 

 before her — one of the old settlers. She knew nothing at all about 

 them, and as they are half a mile from the farm-house and build- 

 ings, it is another evidence they were not planted, at least by any 

 white person within two generations. 



In Macoun's Catalogue of Canadian Plants, pt. I, p. 123, we 

 are told of their being found . (native, I take it) on Pelee Island, 

 and nowhere else in Canada unless planted. Now, what are we 

 to believe regarding this group — nearly one hundred miles as the 

 crow flies north-east of Pelee Island ; has a young tree or a seed 

 been planted there generations ago by the neutral Indians, who 

 are belitved to have used Pelee Island as part of their highway 

 from the south into Canada (see Archaeological Report, 1899, 

 pages 32-33) an 1 so started the group now found, or are they the 

 " last of their race " driven south by the cold climate which suc- 

 ceeded the warm semi-tropical climate which once prevailed over 

 all this country ? Who will solve this riddle ? In any case the 

 discovery is a most interesting one to the lover of the rare and 

 strange in the scientific field, and I gladly respond to the invita- 

 tion of Prof. John Macoun, the Dominion Botanist, (to whom I 

 reported my find) to write it up, believing there are many who wil} 

 be interested to know ot it, 



