PEESENT STATE OF BOTANY IN CANADA. 19 



unexampled, it is also to be feared that the direction thus given to the studies of college 

 students will tend to lessen rather than increase their attention to field, or what is perhaps 

 best known on this continent as systematic or species botany. 



The energies of our college students and graduates will thus, in the future, be with- 

 drawn, not wholly, it is hoped, but necessarily to some extent, from the mere work of 

 collecting and naming specimens (in itself a valuable educational exercise), and from the 

 practical study of botanical classification and the diagnostic characters of the genera and 

 species of Canadian plants. We may still rely upon an increasing number of amateur 

 workers throughout the country, persons of leisure, and even men laden with professional 

 duties, who, while seeking a well-earned week's rest in a rural district, may tire of admir- 

 ing beauties of field and wood, as if Nature offered a mere dumb show, and perchance 

 turn even to botany books for some whisper of the language she speaks. 



We have now a comparatively new, but rapidly increasing, source of botanical power 

 in the large army of school teachers and their pupils in our academies and common 

 schools throughout the country, botany being taught more or less fully in most of the 

 provinces. They may well take up the work dropped by college students. 



The collecting of facts, the finding of rare plants, the noting of the occurrence or 

 absence of species in given districts, the recording of their times of leafing, flowering and 

 fruiting, can best be done by residents in the several localities, and, if we could succeed in 

 banding together the educational forces of the country for this purpose, even to a partial 

 extent, immense service might be rendered to our science with the subsidiary advantage 

 of increasing its popularity by giving a large number who at present do not aspire to be 

 botanists some lot or part in its promotion. I am not unmindful of the excellent work 

 that is being done, often in an unostentatious manner, by local societies, signally prom- 

 inent among which, as a thorough working botanical society, we must place the Natural 

 History Society of Ottawa. But the work now being done by such organizations may 

 be largely aided and supplemented by a more general effort. 



One great want of Canadian botanists is some easy channel of communication with 

 each other. We have no society, and no publication, that will take cognizance of the local 

 lists and scraps of observation that go to make up botanical periodicals so largely and 

 that prove such fertile material in the hands of the botanical worker. There can be no 

 doubt that the progress of botany in Britain during the present century has been largely 

 due to the facilities of publication offered to even the humblest observers by such publica- 

 tions as Loudon's ' Magazine of Natural History,' the London ' Gardeners' Chronicle,' 

 ' The Phytologist,' of Newman, the short-lived ' Botanical G-azette,' of Henfrey, ' Seeman's 

 Journal,' the ' London Journal of Botany,' and other open records, of which everyone 

 could avail himself for the purposes of giving or receiving information. But we have 

 had no such publication in Canada. Thirty years ago an attempt was made to supply 

 this want of our country by issue of the ' Annals of the Botanical Society of Canada.' 

 That publication, during its brief existence, was chiefly remarkable for its local lists of 

 plants, forbidding and unreadable to all but botanical students. Yet these lists gave it a 

 certain permanent value that caused it to be eagerly sought for long after it was out of 

 print. In the United States we have two ably conducted botanical periodicals, and others 

 in England and continental Europe. All of these may be more or less available to Cana- 

 dian botanists, but we are not able through any of them to be sure that we are really 



