TEACHING SCHOOL— STUDYING BOTANY 31 



own. A year or two after his conversion he married a second 

 cousin of mine and later in his life went to Brockville and filled the 

 church there to the satisfaction of the people, so that they kept 

 him for many years, and his son today is the Hon. Geo. P. Graham. 



"Conversion" as it was called, placed you with the saints, 

 who, in my opinion, were lying sinners in many cases. I was full 

 of fun but serious at heart and did only what I thought was right. 

 I tried to be a Methodist and attended class-meeting. One Sun- 

 day in telling my experience I felt I was not as good as I might be 

 and the class-leader told me I ought to have as good a testimony 

 as Brother So-and-So. I knew the Brother lied and I did not, so 

 I resigned from the class-meeting. I had very serious thoughts at 

 this time about religion but in examining the people by whom I 

 was surrounded and who were spoken of as highly religious I had 

 my doubts of them. 



At this stage I shall digress and speak of my development in 

 connection with the science of botany. In another place I have 

 mentioned where I got my first idea in regard to botany, namely 

 that when I was quite a small boy my uncle took me into the 

 orchard and showed me a row of filbert trees and pointed to the 

 aments, or barren flowers, hanging on the branches of the naked 

 trees and said to me: "Jock, these that you see here will all fall 

 off and in the autumn it is on these trees we get the nuts that we 

 use at Christmas time." This lay in my mind and after we came 

 to America I was engaged one morning in May splitting rails and 

 while resting on a heap of the rails I noticed the hazel bushes at 

 the edge of the woods and, like Moses, went to examine and dis- 

 covered that these were identical with what my uncle had shown 

 me in Ireland. I discovered that he did not seem to have known 

 that on these same bushes there were other little objects that were 

 pink and these I found to be only on the bushes that held the 

 aments. Later, I knew that these were the female flowers and 

 that the nuts were produced by these being pollenized by the male 

 flowers. These were the first studies I made in Botany. 



Next, I came across an old gentleman named Fraser, a farm- 

 er with whom my brother-in-law lived, and he told me the names 

 of many of the highly colored flowers around his house and gave 



