ributed to the ease of his old age.
Learned societies honored him, and the illustrious Charles Darwin
called him "my fellow botanist."

[Illustration: John Duncan]

The mother of John Duncan, a "strong, pretty woman," as he called her,
lived in a poor tenement at Stonehaven, on the Scottish coast, and
supported herself by weaving stockings at her own home, and in the
summer went into the harvest field. He always held his mother in honor
and tenderness, as indeed he ought, for she stood faithfully by the
children she ought not to have borne.

As a boy the future botanist developed an astonishing faculty of
climbing. There was a famous old castle upon the pinnacle of a cliff,
inaccessible except to cats and boys. He was the first to gain access to
the ancient ruin, and after him the whole band of boys explored the
castle, from the deep dungeons to the topmost turret.

His first employment led him directly to what became a favorite pursuit
of his lifetime. By way of adding to the slender gains of his mother, he
extracted the white pith from certain rushes of the region, which made
very good lamp-wicks for the kind of lamps then in use in Scotland.
These wicks of pith he sold about the town in small penny bundles. In
order to get his supply of rushes he was obliged to roam the country far
and wide, and along the banks of streams. When he had gathered as many
as he could carry he would bring them home to be stripped. To the end of
his days, when he knew familiarly every plant that grew in his native
land, he had a particular fondness for all the varieties of rush, and
above all for the kind that gave him his first knowledge.

Then he went to a farmer's to tend cattle, and in this employment he
experienced the hard and savage treatment to which hired boys were so
frequently subjected at that day. Drenched with rain after tending his
herd all day, the brutal farmer would not permit him to go near the fire
to dry his clothes. He had to go to his miserable bed in an out-house,
where he poured the water from his shoes, and wrung out his wet clothes
as dry as he could. In that foggy climate his garments were often as wet
in the morning as he left them in the evening, and so days would pass
without his having a dry thread upon him.

But it did not rain always. Frequently his herd was pastured near the
old castle, which, during the long summer days, he studied more
intelligently, and in time learned all about its history and