xxviii NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
of a three weeks' excursion in the preceding summer, showed him 
to be one of the most lynx-eyed discoverers of rare species, as 
well as an accurate discriminator of them. In Baines's Flora of 
Yorkshire (1840) only four mosses were recorded from Teesdale, 
though no doubt many more had been collected. Spruce at once 
raised the number to 167 mosses and 41 hepaticae, of which six 
mosses and one Jungermannia were new to Britain. In April 
1845 he published in the London Journal of Botany descriptions 
of twenty-three new British mosses, of which about half were 
discovered by himself and the remainder by Mr. Borrer and other 
botanists. 
In the same year he published, in the Phytologist, his " List of 
the Musci and Hepaticae of Yorkshire," in which he recorded no 
less than 48 mosses new to the English Flora and 33 others new 
to that of Yorkshire. 
By the liberality of Mr. Borrer, and by exchanges with other 
botanists, he had now obtained specimens of nearly every known 
British moss ; and he had also been in correspondence with 
Bruch and some other Continental botanists, and had received 
from them a large number of European species, which were of 
great value to him for comparison. As it was his practice to 
make a careful microscopical study of all the species he possessed, 
and as his whole spare time for the three years 1842-44 was 
devoted to this work, we can accept his statement to Mr. Stabler, 
that before he went to the Pyrenees he was so thoroughly familiar 
with them that he could give from memory the distinctive 
characters of almost every species. 
In the latter part of 1 844, when he had to leave the York school, 
his future was very unsettled. A plant agency in London and the 
curatorship of some Colonial botanical garden were successively 
discussed with Mr. Borrer and Sir William Hooker, and rejected 
as either unsuitable or uncertain of attainment. The latter 
gentleman then suggested his going as a plant-collector to Spain, 
that being a rich and comparatively little known part of Europe ; 
but on inquiry the country was found to be in so disturbed a 
state that traveUing would be dangerous, and collections difficult 
to preserve and to transport safely to England. The matter was 
decided by the suggestion of the Pyrenees, which Mr. George 
Bentham had visited a few years before, and where it was thought 
that a really good collector, such as Spruce had proved himself to 
be, could easily pay his expenses by the sale of sets of dried plants 
well preserved and accurately named. This expedition was 
decided on in December 1844, chiefly, as Spruce told Mr. Borrer, 
because it would gratify "his irresistible inclination to study his 
