have no hardships in these
respects. Rice is the staple article of food...

"My love to the students. God raise them up for great blessings. Great
things are certainly at hand."

But he was also an erudite botanist. Had he arrived in Calcutta a few
days earlier than he did, he would have been appointed to the place for
which sheer poverty led him to apply, in the Company's Botanical
Garden, established on the right bank of the Hoogli a few miles below
Calcutta, by Colonel Alexander Kyd, for the collection of indigenous
and acclimatisation of foreign plants. There he at once made the
acquaintance, and till 1815 retained the loving friendship, of its
superintendent, Dr. Roxburgh, the leader of a series of eminent men,
Buchanan and Wallich, Griffith, Falconer, T. Thomson, and Thomas
Anderson, the last two cut off in the ripe promise of their manhood.
One of Carey's first requests was for seeds and instruments, not merely
from scientific reasons, but that he might carry out his early plan of
working with his hands as a farmer while he evangelised the people. On
5th August 1794 he wrote to the Society:--"I wish you also to send me a
few instruments of husbandry, viz., scythes, sickles, plough-wheels,
and such things; and a yearly assortment of all garden and flowering
seeds, and seeds of fruit trees, that you can possibly procure; and let
them be packed in papers, or bottles well stopped, which is the best
method. All these things, at whatever price you can procure them, and
the seeds of all sorts of field and forest trees, etc., I will
regularly remit you the money for every year; and I hope that I may
depend upon the exertions of my numerous friends to procure them.
Apply to London seedsmen and others, as it will be a lasting advantage
to this country; and I shall have it in my power to do this for what I
now call my own country. Only take care that they are new and dry."
Again he addressed Fuller on 22nd June 1797:--

"MY VERY DEAR BROTHER--I have yours of August 9, 16, which informs me
that the seeds, etc., were shipped. I have received those seeds and
other articles in tolerable preservation, and shall find them a very
useful article. An acquaintance which I have formed with Dr. Roxburgh,
Superintendent of the Company's Botanic Garden, and whose wife is
daughter of a missionary on the coast, may be of future use to the
mission, and make that investment of vegetables more valuable."

Thus towards the close of