298 THE JOURNAL OF BOTANY 
- §ir James Pacer (1814-1899). 
‘* My mother’s love of collecting had influenced in various degrees 
all her children, chiefly, in relation to natural history, my next elder 
brother Charles and myself. He gave himself chiefly to siaanegt th ; 
I to botany, being guided to it by Mr. Palgrave, a nephew o 
Dawson Turner, who represented in Yarmouth what might tally 
be called the Norfolk School of Botanists. Its leader had been Sir 
James Smith, the purchaser of the eres collections and chiefly 
founder of the Linnean Socie ty; and now its chief members were 
r. Turner and his son-in-law Sir William Hooker. «+s. « 
‘“‘T cannot remember all the times at which I used to collect. 
I think they were chiefly on Satu urday afternoons and on casually 
unoccupied bits of days, and often before breakfast, when I could 
gather alge on the beach and the plants which were abundant on 
the denes and sand-cliffs and salt- marae near the town, and were 
valuable for Pci: with inland collectors. They were enough to 
enable me to make a nearly complete collection of the flora of the 
tein with pees for exchange with other potent eect 
h and some other pupils, and with Coterell (sic) 
Watson, I was able to study the Flora pretty well after ths manner 
of the time—the merely descriptive manner fit for exact systematic 
arrangement in the Linnean orders, then deemed natural enough, 
tho ugh now looking so rigidly artificial. My father in his ‘wealthy 
days “had collected a considerable lib rary ; not for his own use—for 
he was too busy, and had never been able to cultivate his natural 
sport taste and ‘love of all beautiful and gentle things—but for the 
as he hoped, 3%, his pumpiea whatever might chance to be their 
Seneca: for study. And among his books were the great English 
Botany of Smith & Sowerby. in its 36 vols., with coloured plates of 
all known Phanerogams; and Dawson Turner’ s Historia Fucorum 
with its beautiful illustrations. With these and a few more I could 
fairly and fully study my botany, could name and arrange the spe- 
cimens, and make myself enthusiastic in collecting. I studied the 
botany of the district sufficiently to take part with my brother 
Charles in publishing the Natural History of Great Yarmouth; a 
thin 8% in which I ae: gg: in print. He supplied the ento- 
mological part of it, I the rest, using not only my own collections 
but those of all ihe: ‘local iiatiralibte who had recorded anywhere 
complete for the present time; for drainage and various cultivations 
including even that of natural history age! have sadly sxterminatol 
many of the species we used to be proud of... . . 
eT "think it impossible to jk tg too highly the influence of 
the study . Ader y on the course of my life. It introduced me 
into the society of studious and observant: men; it gave me an 
ambition foi success, or at the worst some opportunities for display 
in subjects that were socially harmless; it encouraged the habit of 
observing, of really looking at things and learning the value of 
exact descriptions; it educated me in habits of orderly arrangement. 
