BRITISH ALPINES. 59 



he met his friend the minister, and asked him ' What 

 day ist ? Fast or Sabbath ? * He got his answer, 

 and replied, * Man, I have lost count, but if I had my 

 hands and face washed I would gang to the kirk too.' 

 He was shown to a bedroom for this purpose, but when 

 Mr. Muir, the minister, went to call him he found him 

 fast asleep.*' Such wanderings with their continual 

 exposure to storm and rain, were enough to sap the 

 strongest constitution. His excursions in 1813 brought 

 on illness which, through neglect, terminated fatally, 

 and he died in January, 1814. 



There was at one time a disposition to treat Don's 

 plant records with suspicion. Some of his critics 

 waxed sarcastic about his reputed finds ; one critic 

 even suggested that one of the greatest of his dis- 

 coveries, Lychnis alpina, was sown on the mountain 

 where Don reported it as growing. In this instance 

 time has proved that it was the critic who was wrong, 

 and the flower-hunter who was right ; and the result 

 of a careful investigation of Don's records, made by Mr. 

 G. C. Druce, shows that his errors are far fewer than 

 was generally supposed, and that out of the large 

 number of his reported observations there are only 

 about a dozen in which he made mistakes. 



Passing on from this indefatigable explorer of British 

 Alpines to the plants themselves, we find that they 

 are distributed along the mountain ranges from the 

 far north of Scotland to the Snowdon group in Wales. 

 Their headquarters are in the Grampians ; and the 

 highest hills of Aberdeen, Forfar and Perth are the most 

 prolific in the abundance and variety of species. The 



