May 20, 1915] 
‘NATURE 
311 

on to add to his numerous onerous duties by him- 
self serving on the Council; but he would probably 
consent to act as chairman of the electoral com- 
mittee. 
It is earnestly to be hoped that members of the 
Government will agree to adopt some such scheme. 
To embark without expert—real expert—advice on 
nominating the members of such a Council would 
be to expose it to risks equal to that attending the 
dye scheme, and would make it impossible to 
achieve the objects which they appear to have at 
heart. Let us hope that they will, in this case at 
least, trust the expert. 
Lastly, it is earnestly to be hoped that Mr. 
Pease’s good intentions will not take the form of 
the institution of a 
scholarships. It is grossly unfair to induce young 
men by scholarships to embark on a career which 
has little if no outlook; and that has hitherto 
largely been the case. The status of chemists in 
Government employment, for example, is not such 
as to induce any young man who can choose any 
other profession to devote himself to the career 
of an official chemist. Compared with other civil 
servants, he is underpaid and overworked. And 
although certain manufacturers, to their credit, 
maintain excellent laboratories, in which a young 
man has scope to show his ability and may meet 
with a suitable reward, yet these are the excep- 
tion. It is to increasing their number and 
organising their resources that the efforts of the 
Chemical Council should be devoted. 
The suggestion of the foundation of chemical 
institutes will not meet the case. Those at 
Dahlem, near Berlin, I am informed at first hand, 
are not appreciated by the young chemists who 
work in them; they do not lead to permanent 
The same cause has resulted in the 
comparative failure of our Davy-Faraday Institu- 
tion; and it would be futile to embark on an am- 
bitious scheme for training research chemists 
without first making sure of their having a reason- 
able chance of earning a living when they leave. 
Wiiiiam Ramsay. 
number of Government 
positions. 

A GREAT PLANT COLLECTOR. 
Journal kept by David Douglas during his Travels 
in North America, 1823-1827. Pp. 364. 
(London: W. Wesley and Son, 1914.) Price 
21s. net. 
AVID DOUGLAS, whose journals after 
lying neglected for nearly ninety years 
have recently been printed and published by the 
Royal Horticultural Society, was born near Scone, 
NO. 2377, VOL. 95| 

in Perthshire, in the year 1798. He was appren- 
ticed as a gardener in the Earl of Mansfield’s 
gardens at Scone. When he was about twenty 
years of age he went to the botanic garden at 
Glasgow, where .at that time the elder Hooker 
held the position of professor of botany. He 
became Hooker’s assistant and companion during 
his famous botanical tours in the western High- 
lands, and showed such a love and enthusiasm 
for plants that when the Royal Horticultural 
Society, in quest of a suitable man for a botanical 
expedition to North America, applied to Hooker, 
the latter at once recommended Douglas. Douglas 
accordingly visited the eastern United States and 
Canada in 1823. His journal describing this trip 
has but a mild interest, much of the ground he 
traversed having been already well trodden. He 
fulfilled his task, however, so much to the satis- 
faction of the Royal Horticultural Society that, 
in 1824, he was again dispatched to North 
America, this time to the western side. By reason 
of the number of plants he discovered and intro- 
duced this journey proved an epoch-making one, 
both in botany and horticulture. Douglas left 
Gravesend in July, 1824, and, going by way of 
the Straits of Magellan, reached the mouth of the 
Columbia River the following April. After two 
years’ work in Oregon and California he returned 
by the overland route to York Factory, south of 
Hudson’s Bay, and reached England in October, 
1827. He made a second journey to the same 
regions in 1829, but of this the present volume 
gives no account. 
Douglas stands undoubtedly in the very first 
rank of plant collectors, having as his compeers 
such men only as Masson, Allan Cunningham, 
William Lobb, Robert Fortune, and Wilson. The 
journals show that he possessed to a high degree 
those peculiar and diverse qualities that go to 
make a first-class plant collector—physical courage 
and endurance, contempt of hardships, a love and 
knowledge of botany, together with a certain 
business aptitude and adaptability to new sur- 
roundings. He enjoyed the advantage of a prac- 
tically virgin field for his labours, for scarcely 
any botanical exploration had been done in this 
region since Vancouver’s voyage of survey some 
thirty years before, when Archibald Menzies— 
Vancouver’s surgeon and botanist—had made a 
few excursions near the coast. And not only was 
his field a virgin one; it comprised the finest sylva 
of temperate regions, one might even say, of the 
entire world. 
These journals were written in simple style, 
often apparently after the day’s journey was done, 
with no attempt at literary embellishment and 
agreeably free from any bombast or undue self- 
