His

College at Calcutta, he read with much interest a book by Prof. Balfour of Edinburgh, entitled 'Botany and Religion'; and he resolved, should he ever return to England, to enter on the study of botany. Some years later the opportunity presented itself. Cowell found himself at Cambridge, as the first Professor of Sanskrit and Fellow of Corpus. His health was indifferent, and he was advised to take more regular exercise. friends urged him to begin the study of wildflowers; and Prof. Babington offered himself as a companion in botanical rambles. Cowell, mindful of his Indian resolution, eagerly adopted the suggestion, and set himself to master the elements of the science. Exercise now became a delight to him. Indeed, so successful was the new pursuit that the walks, we are told, were not confined to Cambridge, but expeditions were made to neighbouring counties; and holidays were thenceforward made invigorating and really refreshing in the ardent search for rare plants. In subsequent years Cowell succeeded in collecting a nearly complete flora of the county of Cambridge.

His letters reveal how keen was his interest in herbalising, and how diligently he informed himself of the habitats of rare species. Now he is searching for Cotoneaster on the Great Orme's Head, its only locality in Great Britain. Now he is at Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight, seeking, but unsuccessfully, for the scarce and curious mousetail. Again he is delighted at finding near Shelford a fine patch of the marsh-helleborine. A copy of John Ray's Flora of Cambridgeshire,' published in 1660, the first county Flora ever produced, which he picked up on a secondhand bookstall, fills him with enthusiasm; and he is charmed when he discovers at Chesterton a quantity of the beautiful little moschatel growing on the very spot where Ray recorded it in the 17th century. When an old man, several years past seventy, he insisted, one hot July day, on walking many miles to see if a rare geranium still maintained its old position near the Redcross turnpike.

That men of science should be interested in botany is more in accordance with the natural order of things. Indeed in former times herbalism and medicine were intimately associated together; and many of our early

botanists were physicians. Dr Turner, 'the father of English botany,' was a physician before he became a divine and Dean of Wells. So with most of the Continental herbalists of the 16th century. Leonard Fuchs, the author of the most splendid herbal ever published, was a physician; so was Dodoens, the Dutch herbalist; and L'Obel who was physician to William the Silent; and Mattioli, the great Italian botanist; and the two eminent brothers Jean and Gaspard Bauhin. In modern times the association no longer exists; but a notable illustration of a celebrated surgeon and man of science who found in wildflowers his recreation is seen in the life of Lord Lister, one of the greatest benefactors of mankind. During his career as a medical student, Lister made the acquaintance of Prof. Lindley, the distinguished botanist; and the friendship left a lasting influence on his life. Lister learnt from him the love of wildflowers which gave him so keen a pleasure in after years. During his holidays in Switzerland and at home, he collected and carefully preserved the choicer species he met with; and his herbarium of Alpine plants became eventually a large and valuable one. It was not as a scientific botanist that he pursued his hobby, but as a simple lover of the beauty and interest of wildflowers. He found no distraction from the hours of hospital duties more gentle and effective, we are told, than that which the bright blossoms of the countryside afforded him.

Such are some of those who among our famous men of science and literature have found in wildflowers a recreation and a delight. The list might of course be considerably extended. But sufficient has been said to substantiate the statement with which we started, that others beside Dr Arnold have found in wildflowers the music of their lives.

JOHN VAUGHAN.

Art. 10.-DOMINION VIEWS ON IMPERIAL UNITY.

(4) CANADA.

IT is not the least interesting aspect of the British Empire to-day that it presents such infinite variety in its component parts. Not only are there the obvious differences of colour, race, creed and situation, but even as between the four great self-governing Dominions there are vital differences in internal structure and history as well as in geographical relation to the Empire and the rest of the world. An attempt at an explanation of the attitude of any one of them towards the problem of Imperial organisation must necessarily be prefaced with some explanation of its own special position in the Empire and the world. There is the greatest possible difference between the problem of Australia or New Zealand, isolated as they are in the great Pacific Ocean and of more or less homogeneous British origin, and that of South Africa, with its vast coloured population and its intimate connexion with the great continent traversed by European ambitions; while the problem of Canada, which not only bears within itself the marks of a complex racial history and settlement, but lies beside a great democratic nation once a part of the same Empire, and now inhabited by a vast mixed population undergoing a slow process of unification, differs radically from all the rest.

The history of Canada falls naturally into four periods, the first of which may be said to have been completed with the fall of Montreal in 1760, the second with Confederation in 1867, the third from 1867 to 1900, and the fourth, a short but highly significant period, from 1900 to the present time. The first of these periods constituted a chapter of history, picturesque and fascinating, but bearing no very direct relation to the subject in hand. During the second period an English-speaking population was accumulating at certain points; and political traditions, the fruits of which are visible now, were being slowly matured. Down to the year 1880 or

The first three articles of this series (Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) were published in the Q. R. for January last.

thereabouts, Ontario was a very homogeneous British community, containing two main strata, the first being composed largely of the refugees who left the United States during the Revolution, and their immediate descendants, who brought with them sturdy character and a fierce individualism. The immigration figures of the period between 1850 and 1880 show a steady stream of British settlers, drawn in those days to a large extent from the rural population of the British Isles and composed in the main of people who came out, consciously or unconsciously, with the stamp of the mid-Victorian philosophy of triumphant individualism. Severed from association with political progress in the British Islands, they grew up in the individualistic faith, accentuated by the ease with which certain standards of living could be attained, and by the isolated life of the country and the small village. While the Liberalism of Great Britain slowly moved under various influences towards the socialistic attitude of the present time, the Liberalism of Canada, or at least of Ontario, remained unmoved. The change from the old voluntary school of the earlier periods of settlement, under which most of the prominent men in the political life of Canada down to 1880 or even 1890 were reared, to the over-symmetrical and mechanical public-school system of the present time, has universalised rudimentary knowledge. Knowledge is not in itself education; and the mere multiplication of subjects induces a premature satiety.

What makes the intellectual history of Ontario so important in Canada is the fact that it has been and still is true that emigrants from Ontario supply the formative and governing influences over the whole of the prairie provinces. It is interesting to notice how great can be the influence of a comparatively small section of a race that retains official relation with its parent mass. The decline in the practical influence of the British peoples in the United States dates, of course, from their severance from Great Britain.

The rapid economic expansion of the Dominion which has occurred since 1900, while it has brought in great masses of foreign immigrants, and has somewhat obscured differences in the character of the various parts of Canada, has by no means destroyed them. To begin

with the East, we have Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick still without the effects of any large immigration, and still under the influence of the old-fashioned loyalty, not to the Empire, but to the Mother-Country. Next we have Quebec almost a kind of political cul-de-sac, Catholic, 18th-century French, intensely conscious of its difference from the English but certainly not modern French, to all appearance immovably national. Then the great British province of Ontario, at once the end of Eastern Canada and the beginning of the West; then, down to a comparatively short time ago, the prairie provinces, almost a continuation of Ontario; and, finally, British Columbia, still under the government of the old Crown Colony ideas and nurturing the same kind of loyalty that flourishes in the maritime provinces.

In all this variety there has been and is a genuine unity of feeling, which consists mainly in a love of British institutions as representing equal laws, together with an effective administration of the law not always to be found in the western part of the United States. Linked with this is a sense of protection by Great Britain, which has given time for the growth visible in the Canada of to-day.

The first contact with the outside world that brought home to Canadians in general their relation to the outside world was the part taken by Canadian volunteers in the South African war. The powerful appeal of Imperial Federationists made in the nineties had undoubtedly a considerable effect. At the moment it seemed to produce no great results; and for a time, as when at the end of the last century Canada entered upon a phase of almost over-rapid mechanical development, there was something of a reaction against Federation or anything that interfered with concentrated effort upon the business of national development. But even this development itself, absorbed as it was in purely material affairs, necessarily enlarged the scope of thought, and through the medium of finance Canada began to be international on a large scale.

Naturally during this period large personalities developed, and there was much faith in what was described as the practical man, A kind of worship of our great