John Dewhurst. 



207 



of these men are such as no person of feeling and intelli- 

 gence, and sympathy with pure, hearty, honest endeavour 

 after knowledge and self-improvement, can peruse with- 

 out emotion. Science owes more to them than has ever 

 been confessed, and it is anything but honourable to 

 public taste and public morals, that while the lives of 

 murderers and rascals of all descriptions are read with 

 avidity, and the minutest incidents of their abominable 

 careers demanded and fed upon, the lives of the modest, 

 unassuming votaries of science, both the dead and those 

 who are yet with us, are never so much as inquired for. 

 They have their reward. If it be not in the notoriety of 

 a great criminal, it is in the perennial enjoyment of the 

 highest faculties of our nature, such as are brought out 

 only by loving conversance with the works of God. 



Scarcely anything is recorded of the earlier Lancashire 

 botanists. Of John Dewhurst, mentioned as the first 

 president of the restored botanical society at the begin- 

 ning of the present century, little more is known than that 

 he was a' fustian-cutter by trade, and lived at Red Bank. 

 John Shaw, now of Eccles (since deceased), remembers 

 seeing him in his "pride of place" at the "Lord Nelson," 

 at Ringley, where the annual meeting was at that time 

 accustomed to be held, the first Sunday in May, Mr. S. 

 being then a child, and this the first botanical meeting he 

 was present at. Dewhurst died in Salford, about 1820, at 

 the age of about seventy. He was of a good and well- 

 to-do family, but in the position of "poor relation." A 

 kind friend of the Lancashire botanists in those days, 



