88 
THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
Botanical Club, Gray Botanical Chapter, Fern Chapter and several 
others. 
Members will be kept informed of what is going on in the Club 
by a monthly bulletin free to members. This will doubtless con- 
tain various notes and observations by members. Longer articles 
will probably be published in the American Botanist. 
The charter will remain open until August i6th, and every 
flower-lover who reads this notice is cordially invited to become 
one of the charter members. The dues for the first year will be 
twent^vfive cents, and those who wish to join should send this 
amount wath their name and address to Mr. J. C. Buchheister, 
whose address until the charter closes will be Griffin's Corners, 
Delaware County, N. Y. After August i6th application for 
membership should be made to the officers whose names will be 
announced later. 
THE GINSENG HUNTER. 
It is back in the hills, far from the madding trolley gong, 
that you meet now and then a ginseng hunter. It may be he 
sees you stoop to a plant, and a fellow-feeling prompts him to 
acquaintanceship; or perhaps he drops in upon you as you are 
weathering a showier in some wayside shack, and fellowship in 
adversity, makes, for the nonce, of you twain one. Not that he 
divulges at once the fact of his vocation ; by no means, for gin- 
seng is the most select of roots, and sells dried for about $3 a 
I>ound. He tests you in half a dozen w^ays, as a trout a sus- 
picious worm, before, assured of your trustworthiness, he show^s 
you one of the precio^is forked roots, and bites into it for love of 
its warm, spicy flavor. Like poet and fisherman, the ginseng 
hunter is born, not made. At his best he is kin to Thoreau's 
famous visiter at Walden Pond — that true Homeric or Paphla- 
gonian man. He loves the wild life of outdoors for its own wild 
sake, and all elemental things — the sunshine, and the wind, the 
low flying mist, even a dash of rain; uncultured though he be, 
there is that in him which responds blindly to the solemnities of 
