TEACHING SCHOOL— STUDYING BOTANY 33 



and a half years, and in all my spare time, while I was there, I 

 evidently kept botany to the front. I remember sitting under 

 the fence when I was boarding with my prospective father-in-law, 

 Simon Terrill, who was a well-known Quaker in that district, and 

 he found me with a plant in my hand and said : "John, what dost 

 thee ever expect to make out of the study of botany?" I told 

 him that I did not know but that it gave me a great deal of plea- 

 sure. 



During the first year I was there I would get a number of 

 plants in the summertime and bring them into the school and sit 

 and describe these plants to the best of my knowledge as I had 

 not up to that time thought of drying them and making a collec- 

 tion. I described them so that it could be told what I had found 

 in years to come. This record is in a quarto volume with a num- 

 ber of species described in it by me over sixty years ago. In that 

 same book is a list of 256 plants that I named and collected the 

 first year I was there. 



In August, 1859, I went to Toronto to attend the Normal 

 School for a Session and had the great fortune to board with a 

 Mrs. Wadsworth, on Victoria St. Her son was attending Toronto 

 University and in his third year and a prize man in botany. Very 

 soon we became companions and on Saturdays would go off bo- 

 tanizing. At that time the cemeteries were nearly all brush or 

 woods and we generally went there. I found that as I had learn- 

 ed botany he actually knew nothing of it. He also showed me 

 that I had much to learn. His knowledge was that of the schools 

 and consisted of structural botany and classification obtained 

 chiefly from lectures while mine was of the woods and fields. I 

 knew the plants and where they grew. I soon learned where I 

 was deficient and paid more attention to fundamentals. My 

 experience in the Normal school was a new one to me as I never 

 had heard a lecture or had seen a big school. Looking back now 

 I can see that I was very green, ignorant of many things, but had 

 the power of thinking for myself. I could not write fast enough 

 to take lectures, but put down what I could and filled out my 

 notes afterwards. Doing this got me into difficulties sometimes, 

 but I made progress and was even applied to by older men when 



