rather more flowers. Among these were yellow anotheras showy rudbeckias, orange marigolds, and the white euphorbia. Further on, the country was almost all cultivated, wheat being all cut, maize growing vigorously, grass all closely cropped off, and no flowers. Every engine that has passed us has poured out a column of smoke of intense blackness, the result of bad coal, careless stoking, and total disregard of the comforts of passengers. We passed the Mississippi about midnight, and in the morning found ourselves near Chicago. For miles before reaching it there are grass-grown streets laid out in the bare open country, with a house here and there-indications of a land "boom," such as are continually got up by speculators.

Having six hours to wait for my train to Michigan, I took a 'bus and some walks after breakfast to see the town. The chief impression was of endless vistas of long parallel streets ending in the lake shore, the whole enveloped in a smoky mist worthy of London itself. Like all new American cities, there were great incongruities in the buildings, small twostory wood houses next door to handsome shops or palatial warehouses seven or eight stories high. This extreme irregularity is the more an eyesore from the contrast of wood and granite, or other fine building stone; but, of course, this will gradually disappear. The great lake, which might have given the city a grandeur and dignity of its own, has been spoilt by the railroad companies, for though there is a belt of park and promenade, the shore-front itself is given up to eight parallel lines of railways with ugly iron railings, and a notice that the public will cross this at its own risk. There is here a great area of black dust or mud, screeching engines pouring out dense volumes of the blackest smoke, and at this time of year the grass is dried up, and the trees all blacker than in London. The Dearborn Railway Station is a fine buiding, but the restaurant attached to it is very poor-ragged tablecloths or bare tables, and a general air of shabbiness pervades it. I did not regret having no business to keep me in Chicago. Leaving at noon I passed through a nearly level country of prairie and wood, with luxuriant meadows near the streams

or burnt-up pastures, and reached Trowbridge Station at 5.30, where I was met by Mr. Cook, with whom I was to stay. We had supper, of tea, fruit, etc., and I afterwards tried their stereopticon lantern, which was very poor. The next evening (Friday) I gave my lecture on "Darwinism," and offered to give that on "Colours of Animals" on Monday evening as a return for their hospitality. The next morning Professor Beal took me to a fine bit of original swamp forest, with features which were quite new to me. Throughout my wanderings in the Sierra and the Rockies I had never met with any sphagnum moss, which I should often have been glad of to pack my plants in. In this bit of forest, however, there were acres of such sphagnum as I had never seen before, forming a continuous carpet more than a foot thick, and in this congenial rooting medium there were numbers of very interesting plants. American pitcher-plants (sarracenia) were abundant, but what pleased me more were quantities of the elegant orchis (Habenaria ciliaris), with curious fringed flowers, making quite a sheet of yellow in places, its tubers not in the soil, but embedded in the sphagnum a few inches below the surface.. There was also a curious little plant called gold-thread, allied to the hellebore, and a number of ferns. Among the shrubs were tall vacciniums, and the beautiful red-berried Nemopanthes canadensis, allied to the holly, but deciduous.

On Sunday I saw the botanical garden attached to the college, the library, and the insect collections, which latter were very fine as compared with our English species. Of moths of the genus Catocala, instead of our four species there were about twenty, many of them much larger and more gorgeously coloured, while the Saturnias and other groups were in equal proportion. After giving my lecture on Colour" in the evening, I had to hurry off to catch the train, in which I slept, and reached Kingston the next day early in the afternoon. Here I had been invited to spend a few days in a delightful old country house on the shores of Lake Ontario, in the refined and very congenial society of Mr. and Mrs. Allen, and their two daughters. I much enjoyed this visit, and my genuine admiration of the writings of their only

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son, Grant Allen, was a bond of sympathy. The house is a roomy old-world mansion, situated in a small park with grand old trees, and fruit, flower, and kitchen garden sloping down to the water. Mr. Allen worked himself at his flowers, and had a magnificent collection of gladioli now in full bloom. But what interested me even more was to see rows of vines in the open ground laden with as fine fruit as we grow in a vinery, though the winters are far longer and more severe than ours. But the higher temperature due to the more southern latitude, combined with a clearer atmosphere and greater amount of sunshine, are far more favorable to all fruit and flowers which are uninjured by low winter tempera

tures.

One afternoon I went to visit a relative of the Allens at Gananoque, where they have a small cottage on the rocky bank of the St. Lawrence, looking on to the celebrated Thousand Islands. There is an acre of wild ground, with a little woody ravine bounded by granite rocks, where interesting wild plants are found. The next morning I was taken among the nearer islands in a small yacht, landing on some to collect ferns. They are all ice-ground, often mere bosses rising a few feet above the water, some of the larger ones having pretty villas and gardens on them. A description of this place has been made the subject of one of Grant Allen's bright magazine articles.

One evening Mr. Allen took me to tea at Sir Richard Cartright's, one of the Canadian ministers, at his fine country house in a spacious park, a few miles in the country. One of the sons took me to a wood where trilliums were in flower; afterwards we had tea in a spacious hall. There were several visitors, and the conversation was chiefly about Ireland. Here, as elsewhere in America, our conduct in persistently refusing self-government to Ireland is hardly intelligible, and is almost universally condemned.

On Sunday morning, August 7, I took leave of my very kind hosts, and went by a small steamer through the Thousand Islands to Aelxandria Bay on the American shore and stayed the night at the Thousand Island Hotel. The trip of about