32 TEACHING SCHOOL-^STUDYING BOTANY 



me a list that had been published in England fifty years before, 

 which gave the plants of the counties of Northumberland and 

 Durham. For years this book was the spring from which I 

 gathered my basic knowledge. All these plants were named 

 according to the Linnaean system. I remember that when I would 

 be returning from labour for my dinner I always aimed to pick up 

 a plant that I did not know and then work on it to find out 

 where it stood in the system. As was well known at that time, 

 the system in vogue was an artificial one but it certainly served 

 a tyro and my object was to find out where each species was in 

 the classification. My only other book besides this list, that I 'can 

 remember, was Mistress Lincoln's Botany, and it followed the same 

 system so that I was enabled to make some progress. 



I may mention here how I learned. I would take a common 

 species of roadside or garden plant of which I knew the name 

 and then immediately endeavour to work out its correct name from 

 the classification. The Mullein was the species that I took first. 

 I found it more difficult than I had thought on account of its long 

 and short stamens, but I soon came to understand the arrange- 

 ment of the stamens and pistils so well that most plants could be 

 classified by their form alone. We had a library in Seymour at 

 this time and I obtained a small English Botany from it and learn- 

 ed the most of our common weeds from that book as in that early 

 time all our weeds were immigrants from England, although I did 

 not know it then. 



Another book from which I learned a great deal was Agassiz's 

 "Lake Superior." This gave an account of the plants around 

 Lake Superior and was the only information recorded from that 

 lake until I went there twenty years later. After my spending 

 six years farming in Seymour, as already related, I decided to 

 become a teacher, partly to study Botany and for another purpose 

 that I have spoken of elsewhere. Up to the present I never had 

 had more than one holiday in the year and that was Christmas 

 Day. Frederick and I might take a day's fishing in the summer, 

 but an eight-mile walk and scrambling along the river was not 

 very restful. 



From Seymour I went to Brighton, where I taught school two 



