Science beyond the Rocky Mountains 177 



ists by his extensive acquaintance all over the country, and know- 

 ledge of subjects connected therewith. Messrs Robert King (a 

 farmer near Victoria, and formerly in Messrs Veitch's employ), and 

 Clayton, a nurseryman, are ready to supply seeds and trees, &c. 

 Mr A. C. Anderson, long in the Hudson's Bay Company's service, 

 and Mr Geo. H. Wilson-Brown, are also well acquainted with the 

 natural history of the country. The latter gentleman especially 

 is ready to collect, and enter into correspondence with natural- 

 ists at home. Mr Lloyd Jones is interested in plants (particularly 

 ferns), as is still to some extent Dr W. F. Tolmie, chief factor of 

 the Hudson's Bay Company, after whom Sir William Hooker 

 named the genus Tolmieia, and Townsend his Sylvia Tolmiei. 

 Mr J. Robertson-Stewart, one of the principal importers and 

 merchants, is also at all times ready to assist in the pursuits of a 

 naturalist. At Nanaimo Capt, Price makes extensive collections of 

 the cretaceous fossils found in connexion with the coal ; and lastly 

 (but far from least), Mr James Hepburn, though really a resident of 

 San Francisco, yet spends the greater part of his summers on this 

 coast, collecting birds for the most part, and has accumulated a 

 really princely collection of the Pacific Avi-fauna. He is probably 

 the only thorough zoologist north of California. On the mainland 

 there are still fewer naturalists, British Columbia being very 

 sparsely settled, and to a great extent unexplored and unpeopled, 

 save by Indians. 



Dr Jones, at New Westminster, collects insects, and has an in- 

 teresting set of Lepidoptera ; and another medical practitioner, 

 Mr Featherstonhaugh, takes meteorological observations, &c. At 

 Lilloett, I found one of the traders (Mr Foster) very attentive 

 to and interested in science, and capable of affording a good deal 

 of useful information. Mr W. C. Cormack, of New Westminster, 

 studies Coniferse and other trees. Mr Joseph M'Kay, of the Hud- 

 son's Bay Company at Fort- Yale, is also a man of the same stamp, 

 with some knowledge of natural history, and always very ready to 

 advance the views of naturalists. The northern portion of British 

 Columbia is very little known, and might still have remained a 

 terra incognita, had it not been for the establishment, shortly after 

 the close of the American Civil War in 1865, of "The Collins 

 Russo-American Overland Telegraph Company," which, in the 

 prospect of the failure of the Atlantic cable, proposed to run a 

 line of telegraph right north through British Columbia and Russian 

 America to Prince of Wales Cape in Behring's Straits, and then 



