SEQUOIA AND ITS HISTORY. 1 



The session being now happily inaugurated, your presiding 

 officer of the last year has only one duty to perform before he 

 surrenders his chair to his successor. If allowed to borrow a 

 simile from the language of my own profession, I might liken 

 the President of this Association to a biennial plant. He 

 flourishes for the year in which he comes into existence, and 

 performs his appropriate functions as presiding officer. 

 When the second year comes round, he is expected to blossom 

 out in an address and disappear. Each President, as he re- 

 tires, is naturally expected to contribute something from his 

 own investigations or his own line of study, usually to discuss 

 some particular scientific topic. 



Now, although I have cultivated the field of North Amer- 

 ican botany, with some assiduity, for more than forty years, 

 have reviewed our vegetable hosts, and assigned to no small 

 number of them their names and their place in the ranks, yet, 

 so far as our own wide country is concerned, I have been to a 

 great extent a closet botanist. Until this summer I had not 

 seen the Mississippi, nor set foot upon a prairie. 



To gratify a natural interest, and to gain some title for 

 addressing a body of practical naturalists and explorers, I 

 have made a pilgrimage across the continent. I have sought 

 and viewed in their native haunts many a plant and flower 

 which for me had long bloomed unseen, or only in the hortus 

 siccus. I have been able to see for myself what species and 

 what forms constitute the main features of the vegetation of 

 each successive region, and record — as the vegetation uner- 

 ringly does — the permanent characteristics of its climate. 



1 The address of the retiring President of the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science. Delivered at Dubuque, Iowa, August, 

 1872. (Proceedings American Association, xxi. 1.) 



