Among the many questions sent to Kew from all parts of the world, there must be some of trivial importance, or which could be perfectly well answered at the local botanic gardens. But all genuine inquiries receive attention. Debate has been gravely held, opinions even have been formed and reported upon such matters as a South African cane which some gentleman in those distant parts thought adapted for fishing-rods; upon the value of West African palm-kernels as material for coat-buttons; upon a pithy stem which the government of a West India island believed suitable for razor-strops.

One function of a national institution very seriously regarded at Kew is the training of young men to fill botanic situations in the colonies. Something is demanded of such young men beyond the practical knowledge which suffices at home. Instruction is given them in the principles of scientific botany, and those general conditions which rule the practice of horticulture under differing circumstances. The advantage of this system all around scarcely needs illustration. While serving the interest of the colonies, it increases the sources of information for Kew, since all these emigrants keep up more or less of a correspondence with the institution in which they were trained.

The village of Kew lies on the south side of the Thames, about six miles westward from Hyde Park Corner in London. "The Gardens" are a favorite resort for holiday-makers and tourists, being visited by six or seven hundred thousand persons yearly. Painters also flock there in summer-time. When the crown surrendered its rights to them in 1840, the Gardens had an area of eleven acres, and contained ten greenhouses of one sort or another. Sir William Hooker promptly begged permission to annex the Orangery and the land adjacent; then a part of the Pleasure Grounds; and after that the Royal Kitchen and Forcing Grounds. All these petitions being granted, by 1847 the Gardens had reached their present dimensions-about seventy acres. Three years later the rest of the Pleasure Grounds was granted for the establishment of an Arboretum, making the total area little less than two hundred and fifty acres. "The Arboretum is the richest in Europe, no doubt," says the writer in The Saturday Review, "but probably inferior to that of Harvard University, where special attention has been paid to this department." This admission in a British journal, and The Saturday Review above all others, should be very gratifying to Americans. The failure of Kew's Arboretum to be the finest in the world is explained on the ground that the soil-sandy and shallow, resting on a stratum of gravel-is unsuited to many kinds of trees. In former times, also, when an imperial collection had to be got together as quickly as possible, and as cheaply, specimens

were not planted with the care which might have overcome the disadvantage. It became necessary to reconstruct the Arboretum twenty years ago on this account. A singular example of the influence of fashion in gardening then came to light. The British public had been running after evergreens so hotly that nurserymen had ceased to grow deciduous species. It seems incredible that the authorities of Kew should have asked in vain for months throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, for young aspens. As for American oaks, maples, etc., they absolutely could not be found in the kingdom. Unscientific lovers of the beautiful may rejoice that it has not yet been found necessary to interfere with the old forest trees, planted, perhaps, by Lord Capel. The new-comers are arranged by genus-all the willows, for example, with the alders, around the pretty lake, pines here, cedars there, oaks, nuts, maples, tamarisks, camellias, ranunculus, etc., etc.

In the Garden proper the smaller plants are found in bewildering array. No list of the species represented at Kew has been taken since that of the younger Aiton in 1810, but one is now being made. Some departments have been catalogued already. Of orchids, there are about 1,400 species; ferns, 1,100; stove plants, 2,500; succulents, 1,000; palms and cycads, 500; greenhouse plants, 3,000; herbaceous, 4,000; trees and shrubs, 3,000; in several cases, however, the figure is but a guess as yet. The total, great as it will prove to be, bears but a small proportion to the sum of Nature's wealth. If we take the flowering plants alone, as enumerated in Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum, there are two hundred natural orders, 10,000 genera, and 100,000 species; and this leaves out of account the ferns and all the lower orders of Cryptogamia. The Economic Section has few visitors, and they are not tempted to carry exploration far. Not a few of the culinary and medicinal herbs in use are found here. If by some fatal chance the onion of commerce should be exterminated in the back-gardens of England, Kew is prepared to replace it. Side by side therewith grow the patience-dock and the skunk-cabbage, the briony, the cuckoo-pint, the Japanese yam, and the all-good. In ferns the Kew collection is exceedingly rich. It has had three special benefactors in this department, to the first of whom, Mr. George C. Joad, the public is indebted for the charming rock-garden opened in 1881. Sir Joseph Hooker had long been working for one, and the bequest of Mr. Joad's collection of ferns brought the matter to a crisis. Dr. Cooper Forster was an enthusiast upon the culture of filmy ferns, and Mr. W. C. Carbonell was specially interested in the cultivation of hardy ferns, particularly in the crossing of them, and the development of sports. Both these gentlemen bequeathed their treasures for the nation's enjoyment when their own power of enjoying them ended.

The glass houses at Kew are extensive structures. The Winter Garden covers more than an acre and a half of ground. The Palm House is three hundred and sixty-two feet long and one hundred feet wide. The new Orchid House is one hundred and forty feet in length, adding the two wings together. This last is not wholly satisfactory-to the orchid enthusiast an orchid house never is, nor can be. Supplemented, however, by a low, neat range, from which the public is excluded, nearly all the 1,400 species which form the national collection thrive admirably. British orchidists are proud of Kew-nowadays-for it was not so satisfactory in this department a few years since.

SKETCH OF HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.

MR. SCHOOLCRAFT was a conspicuous figure in the scien

tific life of the early part of the century. A pioneer in some fields, the immediate follower of the pioneers in others, he was, in all the branches of research to which he gave attention, earnest, ready, diligent, sagacious, original, and modest. As among his titles to be remembered, the biographer who prefaces his Personal Memoirs names the early period at which he entered the field of observation in the United States as a naturalist; the enterprise he manifested in exploring the geography and geology of the Great West; and his subsequent researches as an ethnologist in investigating the Indian languages and history. "To him we are indebted for our first accounts of the geological constitution and the mineral wealth and resources of the great valley beyond the Alleghanies, and he is the discoverer of the actual source of the Mississippi River in Itasca Lake. For many years, beginning with 1817, he stirred up a zeal for natural history from one end of the land to the other, and, after his settlement in the West, he was a point of approach for correspondents "-on these topics and for all the Indian tribes.

HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT was born in Albany County, N. Y., March 28, 1793, and died in Washington, D. C., December 10, 1864. He was the descendant, in the third generation, of an Englishman, James Calcraft, who, having served with credit in the armies of the Duke of Marlborough, came to America in the reign of George II, in the military service, and was present at operations connected with the building of Forts Anne, Edward, and William Henry. After these campaigns he settled in Albany County as a land-surveyor, married, and in his old age conducted a large school-the first English school that was taught in that frontier region. In connection with this incident his name became

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changed to Schoolcraft. He died at the age of one hundred and two years. John, his third son, was a soldier under Sir William Johnson. Lawrence, John's son, distinguished himself during the siege of Fort Stanwix. He was afterward director of the glassworks of the Hon. Jeremiah Van Rensselaer, at Hamilton, near Albany; and established the manufacture of glass in western New York.

Henry Schoolcraft spent his childhood and youth in Hamilton, cultivated poetry, and maintained an excellent standing in scholarship. At an early age he manifested a taste for mineralogy and natural science, which were then (about 1808) almost unknown in the country; formed the beginnings of collections; and organized an association for mental improvement. He investigated the drift stratum of Albany County as seen in the bed of Norman's Kill; and afterward, while living at Lake Dunmore, Vt., put himself under the teaching of Prof. Hall, of Middlebury College; added chemistry, natural philosophy, and medicine to his studies; erected a chemical furnace, and went into experimenting; and picked up a knowledge of Hebrew, German, and French. He began writing for books and periodicals in 1808contributing, among other things, papers on the Burning Springs of western New York, and on archæological discoveries that had been made in Hamburg, Erie County. In the last paper, which was published at Utica in 1817, he pointed out the necessity of discriminating between the antique French and European, and the aboriginal period, in American antiquity. He was engaged for a time in directing the building of works connected with his father's glass-making enterprises in Vermont, New Hampshire, and western New York. The ideas and knowledge gained in these operations supplied the material for his proposed work on Vitreology, or the application of chemistry to glass-making, the publication of which was begun in 1817. The supervision of these works required the making of considerable journeys, and these created in him the desire to travel through the wilds of the "Far West," which then hardly extended beyond the Missouri River.

He made some " preliminary explorations" to his contemplated journey in western New York in 1816 and 1817, and started from Olean on the Alleghany River for a journey down the Ohio and up the Mississippi in 1818. A large company of intending emigrants had gathered there waiting for the season to open, and Schoolcraft took passage in the first ark. Arrived at Pittsburg, he stopped to explore the geology of the Monongahela Valley, and was greatly interested in the rich coal and iron beds. He stopped to visit the Grave Creek mound and the ancient works at Marietta. At Louisville he found "organic remains" of several spe

cies in the limestone rocks of the falls, and published anonymously in the paper some notices of its mineralogy. At the mouth of the Cumberland River he exchanged the ark for a keelboat or barge, with which, propelled by poles pushing on the bottom, he made from three to ten miles a day against the swift current of the Mississippi to Herculaneum, Mo. On this voyage he traveled over a large part of the west bank on foot, and gleaned several facts in its mineralogy and geology which made it an initial point in his future observations. He spent three months in examining the lead mines, personally visiting every mine or digging of consequence in the Missouri country and tracing its geological relations into Arkansas. Hearing of syenite suitable for millstones on the St. Francis, he visited that stream and discovered the primitive tract; and he pushed his examinations west beyond the line of settlement into the Ozark Mountains. He now determined to call the attention of the Government to the importance of its taking care of its domain in the mines, and with this purpose packed his collections and took passage in the new steamer St. Louis for New Orleans. Hence, having inquired into the formation of the delta of the Mississippi, he sailed by brig for New York. He opened his collections and invited examination of them, published a book on the mines and physical geography of the West and a letter on its resources, and went to Washington to present his views on the care of the mines to the officers of the Government. While he was looking for a secretary within whose purview the matter fell, Mr. Calhoun invited him to accompany General Cass, Governor of Michigan, as naturalist and mineralogist on an expedition to explore the sources of the Mississippi and to inquire into the supposed value of the Lake Superior copper mines. He accepted the position, though the compensation was small, because, he says, "it seemed to be the bottom step of a ladder which I ought to climb."

Mr. Schoolcraft left New York in March, 1820, reached Niagara Falls on the 1st of May, and Detroit by steamer a week later. While waiting for the completion of arrangements for embarkation, he attended to the correspondence which had been provoked by the publication of his work on the mines and the resultant awakening of interest in the varied resources of the Mississippi Valley and the subject of geographical and geological explorations. He determined to reply to all letters that appeared to be honest inquiries for geographical facts, "which I only, and not books, could communicate." The route of the expedition "lay up the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers and around the southern shores of Lakes Huron and Superior to Fond du Lac, thence up the St. Louis River in its rugged passage through the Cabotian Mountains to the Savannah summit which divides the Great Lakes