THE MUSIC OF WILD FLOWERS n 



delay. To his intense grief and indignation he was 

 forced to obey, and the projected Flora was never 

 compiled. 



It will doubtless come as a surprise to many persons 

 to learn that the author of Principles of Political 

 Economy was an ardent field botanist. When, as a lad 

 of fifteen, he paid a visit to Sir Samuel Bentham at his 

 house in the south of France, he made friends with his 

 host's only son, George, afterwards the author of the 

 well-known Handbook of the British Flora, and it was 

 under his influence that John Stuart Mill became a 

 " searcher after simples." For many years, after he 

 had entered the India Office, Mill was accustomed to 

 spend his Sundays in long botanical rambles in the 

 neighbourhood of London, while his annual holiday 

 was usually passed in the same pursuit. Surrey and 

 Hampshire were the chief spheres of his researches, and 

 in these counties he made many interesting discoveries, 

 which he was wont to chronicle in the pages of The 

 Phytologist. It is interesting to search the numbers of 

 this botanical miscellany for the contributions of J. S. 

 Mill. He seems to have been the first discoverer in 

 Surrey of the beautiful American balsam, Impatiens 

 fulva, which he found growing sparingly on the banks 

 of the Wey, near Guildford. At Guildford, too, in the 

 great chalk quarries, he found the historic woad, con- 

 cerning which " Caesar saith," in the quaint language of 

 Gerard, " that all the Brittons do colour themselves 

 with woad, which giveth a blew color." Both these 

 plants still flourish abundantly in the localities where 

 Mill found them. The same cannot, unfortunately, be 

 said of the magnificent royal fern, Osmunda regalis, 

 which Mill tells us grew in some swamps near Dorking, 



