The Presidents of the 
Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union. 
The Rev. CANON W. FOWLER, M.A. 
The parents of the younger members of the Union were in 
their nonage, when Canon Fowler was an enthusiastic botanist 
wandering about Lincolnshire to find what might yet be discover- 
ed. He once said that in his early days he thought he would 
never tire of walking after plants, but acknowledged with a sigh 
that though the mind might be as interested and keen as ever, 
after the seventh decade of existence the legs often refuse to do 
their share of the work. Youth never calculates on the extra 
weight there is to carry, and the growing stiffness of age. We 
shall only have to live long enough to experience this as well as 
many other things. In the early fifties Canon Fowler was 
essentially a field botanist, and he has remained the same till 
to-day as far as is now possible. He knew the flora of the 
Winterton-Broughton neighbourhood, and the Saltfleetby littoral 
better than anyone does to-day. 
There are notes of his in existence going back as far as 1852. 
His first contribution to botanical literature that we have met 
with was in ‘“‘ The Phytologist,’1857, p. 302, on ‘‘ Salicornia herbacea, 
and common plants in Lincolnshive.” ‘this was followed in the 
