ARTICLE V. 
MEMORIAL SKETCH OF THE LATE JOHN MOSER. 
By G. U. Hay. 
A tall venerable-looking man, with form somewhat bent 
from age but with elastic step and cheeks ruddy with the glow 
of outdoor exercise, used occasionally to walk into our 
rooms bringing with him a package of mosses or fungi. This 
was John Moser, who died recently at his home near Havelock, 
N. B., in the eighty-first year of his age. Mr. Moser was of a 
retiring disposition, of simple and unobtrusive manners and a 
reverent student of nature. His holidays and many leisure hours, 
for he was a country school teacher, was devoted to walks through 
by-paths, glens and woods where he had trained his eye to observe, 
in addition to the flowering plants, those lowly but beautiful 
forms of mosses, lichens and fungi. It was his especial delight 
to study -the mosses, and though not possessed .of a microscope 
or many books on the subject, he was enabled by his quick eye 
and a remarkably intuitive perception of differences of structure 
to detect several hundred different species of New Brunswick 
mosses, more than a dozen of which are new to science, having 
been determined by the great Swedish bryologist, Kindberg, 
and other specialists. Unfortunately many of his specimens 
were rather crudely prepared and mounted, but their generous 
abundance makes up in a measure for their lack of beauty on 
herbarium sheets. A list of mosses discovered by him was pub- 
lished in the Bulletin of the Natural History Society of New 
Brunswick, volume IV, number 16, pp. 23-31. Shortly afterwards 
a collection embracing all the mosses collected by Mr. Moser 
and noted in the catalogue, was presented by him to our society 
and placed in the herbarium where it will serve for future refer- 
ence by students, and remain as a memorial of a quiet but 
discerning and industrious nature student. 
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