i 5 4 MV LIFE 



my lecture, we called first on a Mr. Seitz, a druggist, who 

 sent us to the Masonic Hall, but in vain. Then we tried the 

 Wesleyan College and the Normal University, but both were 



recently established, and not the possessors of a lantern. At 



length we found one at a Mr. Chapman's, but it was an 



ordinary magic-lantern, suitable for a disc about four feet 

 diameter, and with a common oil-lamp, giving a poor light. 



When the lecture was given, to add to my difficulties the 



lamp went out in the middle, and 1 had to go on talking till 

 it was set right. There were only about a hundred people, 

 so that there were none very far off, and they seemed fairly 

 well satisfied. 



One day we drove over to call on an old French farmer, 

 M. Joseph Henry, who was a botanist and a student of mosses 

 and grasses. He was out, but his wife showed us a little heap 

 of stones near the house in which, on the north side, he had 

 a few very small mosses growing, one of them a new species 

 he had discovered, named after him, Barbula Henrici. It was 

 a shabby, rickety wooden farmhouse, with a few sheds in the 

 usual style of small prairie farmers. Going back we met the 

 owner returning home, and stayed a few minutes to talk. He 

 had been in the country twenty years but could only speak 

 very broken English, and when he found we could not speak 

 any better French, he was quite indignant that a scientific 

 man could not speak in his beautiful language — the language 

 of the civilized world! He made me feel quite small. How- 

 ever, he managed to tell us that the American botanists did 

 not know their own country. : They all say there are no 

 mosses in Kansas. But / have found mosses ! I have found 

 new species of mosses ! And when I send them my discov- 

 eries they will not give me the names — they will not write to 

 me even ! " So we condoled with him, and said good-bye to 

 the unappreciated botanist of the arid plains of Kansas. 



Twenty-nine years before my visit great herds of buffalo 

 roamed over the site of Salina, and there was not a house or 

 a hut for fifty miles around. It is now a rapidly growing town, 

 with five railways diverging from it, and land speculation is 

 rampant. In the business part of this small town lots twenty- 



