access to Sir R. Preston's botanical library, a privilege of the utmost value to one circumstanced like Douglas, and endowed with such faculties of mind and memory as he possessed. He remained about two years at Valleyfield, being foreman during the last twelve months to Mr. Stewart, when he made application and succeeded in gaining admission to the botanical garden at Glasgow. In this improving situation it is almost needless to say that he spent his time most advantageously and with so much industry and application to his professional duties as to have gained the friendship and esteem of all who knew him, and more especially of the able and intelligent curator of that establishment, Mr Stewart Murray, who always evinced the deepest interest in Douglas's success in life. Whilst in this situation he was a diligent attendant at the botanical lectures given by the professor of Botany in the hall of the garden, and was his favorite companion in some distant excursions to the Highlands and islands of Scotland, where his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler.
It was our privilege, and that of Mr. Murray, to recommend Mr. Douglas to Joseph Sabine, Esq., then honorary secretary of the Horticultural Society, as a botanical collector; and to London he directed his course accordingly in the spring of 1823. His first destination was China, but intelligence having about that time been received of a rupture between the British and Chinese, he was dispatched, in the latter end of May, to the United States, where he procured many fine plants, and greatly increased the Society's collection of fruit trees. He returned late in the autumn of the same year, and in 1824 an opportunity having offered through the Hudson's Bay Company, of sending him to explore the botanical riches of the country in the Northwest America, adjoining the Columbia River, and southward towards California, he sailed in July for the purpose of prosecuting this mission.
