it into a joint-stock company, and persuaded me, along with Mr. Fortune, the well-known traveller and plant-collector in China and Japan, and several other persons connected with horticulture, to become directors. After two or three years (there being a mortgage on the property) the company had to be dissolved, and Mr. Mongredien lost all he had invested in it. During the time it lasted, however, I and my wife often spent from Saturday to Monday at Heatherside with Mr. Mongredien, his wife, and two daughters; and among the friends we occasionally met there was Professor (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen, the great anatomist, and one of the most charming of companions. Mr. Mongredien himself was a highly educated and most energetic man, and a great converser. He knew most European languages well, including modern Greek, and was a good classical scholar. He was also well read in general literature, devotedly fond of plants and of nature generally, and somewhat of a bon vivant; and when I add that his wife was agreeable, and his daughters intellectual, it will be seen that we had all the elements to make our visits delightful. I had had some correspondence with Professor Owen many years before about the specimens of orang-utang I sent home from Borneo, and I had occasionally met him at scientific societies or at the British Museum; but here I saw him in his social aspect, telling us curious little anecdotes about animals, or quoting the older poets for the gratification of the young ladies. He was also very fond of gardening, and we spent much of our time in long walks about the grounds, where there were quantities of the finest species of conifers from about ten to thirty feet high and in perfect health, and showing all the exquisite beauties of their special type of vegetation in form, foliage, and colour more completely than when at a greater age. These visits gave me a knowledge and love of trees and shrubs, which has been a constant pleasure to me in the three gardens I have since had to make, from the very beginning.

Among the dearest of my friends, the one towards whom I felt more like a brother than to any other person, was Dr.

Richard Spruce, one of the most cultivated and most charming of men, as well as one of the most enthusiastic and observing of botanists. As he lived in Yorkshire after 1867, I only saw him at rather long intervals, but I generally took the opportunity of lecture engagements in the north to pay him a few days' visit. Our correspondence also was scanty, as he was a great invalid and could not write much, and I only preserved such letters as touched upon subjects connected with my own work. I will, however, give a few extracts from these, both to illustrate the character of a littleknown man of science, and also because some of the matters touched on are of general scientific interest.

I sent Spruce a copy of my little volume of Essays on "Natural Selection," in 1870, and after reading it he sent it on to his friend, W. Wilson, of Warrington, a British botanist, and, like my friend, an enthusiast in mosses. His reply Spruce sent to me, and it is rather amusing, as showing the feelings of the older school of naturalists towards the new heresy of Darwinism.

"MY DEAR FRIEND,

"You will think me a wayward chiel when you hear my confession that to-day, feeling very squeamish mentally, I happened to bethink myself of Wallace's book, and ventured to open it with great misgivings about my coming into rapport with one whom you introduced to me as the champion of Darwinian philosophy. With fear and trembling I paused on the threshold of the book, just to see what I should have to grapple with. The 'Contents,' therefore, engaged such attention as I could command, and after examining, or rather glancing, at the contents of the first seven chapters without much emotion of either attractive or repulsive character, skipped over to chapter x., the last of the series, not greatly excited at either pole of the intellect, until I came to 'Matter is Force; all Force is probably Will-force.' 'Oho!' said I, 'now we come to something of interest and connected with my friend Rev. T. P. Kirkman's rather unskilfully written pamphlet on this very subject-we shall have everything in

shape and properly argued by the clear-minded Wallace, no doubt.'

"My inquisitiveness, however, did not prevent my beginning at the beginning of the chapter, and I now write before I have come to the question of force and matter. I am delighted and most agreeably surprised to discover that Wallace, whom I least expected to agree with me, confirms what I said to you in a previous letter about Darwin's theory being one truth in conjunction with another (and perhaps higher) truth; not the only truth in reference to created entities.

"Well, if Wallace has nothing more contrarient than the contents of this chapter are likely to present to me, I shall not fear to read the rest of the book despondent of coming into complete harmony with him, neither need you fear that I shall remain sceptical on those points where already I am willing to receive them in hypothesis for all really useful or practical purposes in reference to classification. I have as yet to assure myself that chapter x. is not a delusive phantasmal addition written or dreamed by myself, and which I shall soon find, on waking, to be unreal and imaginary.

"As it is, all my apprehensions of a soporific, such as I found Darwin's book to be, are dispelled. The book is a very readable one, at any rate, and no one need go to sleep over it... (a long passage here on origin of sense of justice).

"Many, many thanks for the loan of this book. Even the little I have read would demand a most grateful return, and I would not have missed it for a good deal. I now anticipate an intellectual feast over the whole of the book, and shall carry it with me joyfully and hopefully to Southport.

"I am glad to learn that Terrington Carr is not entirely obsolete and abolished. I do hope to see it again with my own eyes, and to gather the sphagnum.

"Ever affectionately and truly yours,
"W. WILSON."

It is curious that this chapter x., which was so grievous a falling-off to Darwin that he scored it with "No! No!"

and could hardly believe I wrote it, should have been the means of attracting one good botanist to read it with attention, and thus probably to make a convert.

A letter from Spruce, dated Welburn, Yorkshire, December 28, 1873, gives some interesting matter on a botanical subject on which I had consulted him.

"My article on the modifications in plant-structure produced by the agency of ants was never printed. After I had been told that the MSS. was in the printer's hands, it was returned to me with the request that I would strike out of it two or three short passages, amounting altogether to hardly a page of the Linnean Journal. I declined to do this, for the obnoxious passages summarized my views on the permanent effects produced on certain species of plants by the unceasing operations of ants, extending doubtless through thousands of ages; and these views were founded on observations continued during eight consecutive years. The bare reading of the paper, at the Linnæan, seems to have left a very erroneous impression on some of the auditors. Somebody-I believe it was at a meeting of your own Entomological Society-has credited me with the theory that plants take to climbing to get out of the way of the ants! As I read this absurd statement I thought that none of the plants I had commented on had a climbing habit; but on looking over the list of two or three hundred species, I find there is a single one that climbs.

"When you go to the British Museum or to the Kew Herbarium, ask to look at the genus Tococa or Myrmidone, in Melastomaceæ, and you will see examples of the curious sacs on the leaves which are inhabited by ants. Similar sacs are found on the leaves also of certain Chrysobalaneæ, Rubiaceæ, etc., and analogous ones on the branches of cordias and other plants. I believe that in many cases these sacs have become inherited structures—as much as the spurs of orchids and columbines, and thousands of other asymetrical structures, all of which I suppose to have originated in some long continued external agency.

"I know that I ought to have gone carefully over all my

specimens again, and to have had drawings prepared to illustrate my memoir. It is the inability to do this which has kept me from writing on many subjects which engaged my attention during the course of my travels. . . .

"The ants cannot be said to be useful to the plants, any more than fleas and lice are to animals. They make their habitation in the melastomas, etc., and suck the juice of the sweet berries; and the plants have to accommodate to their parasites as they best may. But even an excrescence may be turned into a 'thing of beauty,' as witness the galls of the wild rose.

"That diseased structures may become inherited-even in the human subject-there is plenty of evidence to prove. Some curious instances are given in Dr. Elam's 'Physician's Problems.'

At this period Dr. Spruce was, of course, not aware of the very strong evidence against the inheritance of acquired characters of any kind, nor had he the advantage of Kerner's wonderful series of observations on the nature of protective plant-structures against enemies of various kinds-" unbidden guests." Nor was he aware of Belt's remarkable explanation of the use to the plant of one of the most remarkable of these ant-structures-the bull's-horn thorns of a species of acacia. He shows that the ants encouraged by these structures to inhabit the plants are stinging species, are very pugnacious, and thus protect the foliage both from browsing mammals, from other insects, and even from the large leaf-cutting ants.1 In a later letter, however, Dr. Spruce adopts utility to the plant as a general principle.

In a letter, dated Coneysthorpe, Malton, Yorkshire, July 28, 1876, he writes as follows:

"I can hardly say that I have ever speculated on the purport of the odours of leaves, but I have (at your instance) rummaged in my notes and my memory, for such evidence as I possess on that head, and will lay it before you.

“Every structure, every secretion, of a plant is (before all) 1 "The Naturalist in Nicaragua,” pp. 218, 223.

VOL. II.

F