SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY! 
THE session being now happily inaugurated, your presiding 
officer of the last year has only one duty to perform before he 
surrenders his chair to his successor. If allowed to borrow a 
simile from the language of my own profession, I might liken 
the President of this Association to a biennial plant. He 
flourishes for the year in which he comes into existence, and 
performs his appropriate functions as presiding officer. 
When the second year comes round, he is expected to blossom 
out in an address and disappear. Each President, as he re- 
tires, is naturally expected to contribute something from his 
own investigations or his own line of study, usually to discuss 
some particular scientific topic. 
Now, although I have cultivated the field of North Amer- 
ican botany, with some assiduity, for more than forty years, 
have reviewed our vegetable hosts, and assigned to no small 
number of them their names and their place in the ranks, yet, 
so far as our own wide country is concerned, I have been to a 
great extent a closet botanist. Until this summer I had not 
seen the Mississippi, nor set foot upon a prairie. 
To gratify a natural interest, and to gain some title for 
addressing a body of practical naturalists and explorers, I 
have made a pilgrimage across the continent. I have sought 
and viewed .in their native haunts many a plant and flower 
which for me had long bloomed unseen, or only in the hortus 
siccus. I have been able to see for myself what species and 
what forms constitute the main features of the vegetation of 
each successive region, and record —as the vegetation uner- 
ringly does —the permanent characteristics of its climate. 
1 The address of the retiring President of the American Association’ 
for the Advancement of Science. Delivered at Dubuque, Iowa, August, 
1872. (Proceedings American Association, xxi. 1.) 
