CONTINUATION OF BOTANICAL STUDIES 43 



and as these species required the work of specialists I wrote to 

 Dr. Robbins of Vermont, regarding the potamogetons and 

 Professor Englemann of St. Louis, Missouri about the rushes. 

 These gentlemen answered promptly and I had their help in all 

 my difficulties as long as they lived. Before this year I sent my 

 difficult species to Kew, but Sir Joseph Hooker had ceased to 

 work on American Botany and had left the work to Dr. Asa Gray 

 of Harvard. I wrote Dr. Gray and I suppose recited my successes. 

 His answer was very caustic and he plainly told me that others 

 might accept my statements, not Asa Gray. Of course I made 

 good and I found a kind, generous, and noble man. Years after, 

 I met him in Montreal, and remember the merry twinkle of his 

 eye when he told how he sat on my assertion of knowledge. 



The upshot of my ten years or more of botany had given me 

 standing in England and Scotland as well as in the United States, 

 and I was becoming known even in Canada and my own town of 

 Belleville. This year, Albert College rose from an Academy to a 

 University and the necessity arose to increase the staff and the 

 range of subjects. Bishop Albert Carman, Principal of the 

 University asked me if I would undertake the chair of Natural 

 History, and give my lectures in the morning. I fell in with the 

 arrangement and took up the work. I had never heard a lecture 

 in College, but I was a teacher and succeeded to my own satis- 

 faction anyway, and as there were no complaints, I went on in 

 my own way making sure of the statements I made. My know- 

 ledge of botany and geology, physical geography and meteor- 

 ology was all first hand and I could give as much in half an hour 

 as the average student could swallow, if not digest. I had un- 

 consciously been preparing myself for the future in the above 

 studies and it soon became apparent. 



At this time Canada was often looked on as the "Lady of the 

 Snows," and we helped that opinion by our winter sports. One 

 section of our people maintained that Canada was a mere fringe 

 along the Great Lakes and the arable land only fifty miles in depth 

 at the most. The other had a wider outlook. I confess I be- 

 longed to the majority, or the first section. My reading the 

 accounts of explorations and travellers' tales led me to believe 



