EST AUDUBON'S LABRADOR 



jumping up and down in the stern of the boat. 

 It was an interesting island, and we found 

 eiders and great black-backed gulls breeding 

 there. Paul, out of kindness to the botan- 

 ist, brought him a branch of Labrador-tea, a 

 plant which grows in profusion everjrwhere. 

 Paul had never really looked at it before, and 

 was struck with the beauty of its flower-clus- 

 ters and its long narrow leaves with rusty 

 woolly lower surfaces. He assured me — in- 

 credible as it may seem — that he had never 

 seen this flower before and thought, as he 

 picked it, that it was something unusual. It 

 was a marked illustration of a common and 

 well-known fact that most of us have eyes and 

 do not see. A still more striking instance is 

 worth narrating here. A college friend of mine 

 who had lived since graduation on Cape Cod, 

 wrote me that a book I had sent him "recalled 

 an odd illustration of observation and its lack. 

 I was asked to secure for an Amherst Agricul- 

 tural Professor some beach peas. I had never 

 heard the name, but I remembered that when 

 a boy I had seen something at a certain place 

 in Woods Hole, which must have been the 

 desired plant. The next day I ran across the 

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