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:--