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MR. John Josselyn, the writer of this book, was only brother, as he says, to Henry Josselyn, Esq., many years of Black Point in Scarborough, Me.; and both were sons to Sir Thomas Josselyn, Knt., of Kent, whose name is at the head of the new charter obtained by Sir Ferdinando Gorges for his Province in 1639, but who did not come to this country. Mr. Henry Josselyn was at Piscataqua, in the interest of Capt. John Mason, at least as early as 1634; but, in 1636, he is one of the Council of Gorges’s Province in Maine, and continued in that part of the country the rest of his life. He succeeded in 1643, by the will of Capt. Thomas Cammock, to his patent at Black Point, and soon after married his widow. He is afterwards Deputy-Governor of the Province; and until 1676, when the Indians attacked and compelled him to surrender his fort, he was, says Mr. Willis,—whose valuable papers are cited below,—“one of the most activeand influential men in it;” holding, “during all the changes of proprietorship and government, the most important offices.” He is then a magistrate of the Duke of York’s Province of Cornwall, and, as late as 1680, a resident of Pemaquid; when he is spoken of, in a letter of Gov. Andros to the commander of the fort at Pemaquid, as one “whom I would have you use with all fitting respect, considering what he hath been and his age.” He is living in 1682; but had died before the 10th of May, 1683,[1]leaving no descendants.[2]
Notwithstanding the evidence, above afforded, of the social position of the family of which Henry and John Josselyn were members, the present writer failed in tracing it, doubtless from not knowing in which county it had its principal seat. In this uncertainty, it occurred to him to make application to the eminent English antiquary,—the Rev. Joseph Hunter, Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries of London,—to whom he was indebted for former kind attentions; and was favored by this gentleman with such directions as left nothing to be desired. “The Josslines,” writes Mr. Hunter “(the name is written in some variety of orthographies,and now more usually Joceline), are quite one of the old aristocratic families of England, having several knights in the early generations; being admitted into the order of baronets, and subsequently into the peerage.... Their main settlement was in Hertfordshire, at or near the town of Sabridgeworth; and accounts of them may be read in the histories—of which Chauncy’s, Salmon’s, and Clutterbuck’s are the chief—of that county. But a fuller and better account is to be found in the ‘Peerage of Ireland,’ by Mr. Lodge, keeper of the records in the Birmingham Tower, Dublin: 4 vols. 8vo, 1754.”[3]
According to Lodge, the family begins with a Sir Egidius, who passed into England in the time of Edward the Confessor, and was descended from “Carolus Magnus, King of France, with more certainty than the houses of Lorraine and Guise.” Of this Sir Egidius was Sir Gilbert de Jocelyn, who accompanied the Conqueror, and had Gilbert—called St. Gilbert, being canonized by Pope Innocent III. in 1202—and Geoffry. To this Geoffry is traced back John Jocelyn, living in 1226; who married Catherine, second daughter and co-heir to Sir Thomas Battell, and had Thomas, who married Maud, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Hide, of Hide Hall in Sabridgeworth, county of Hertford, Knt., by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of John Sudeley; Baron Sudeley, in the county of Gloucester. He had Thomas Jocelyn, Esq., whomarried Joan, daughter of John Blunt, and had Ralph, who married Maud, daughter of Sir John SuttonaliasDudley, and had Geoffry of Hide Hall, 1312. Geoffry married Margaret, daughter of Robert Rokell or Rochill, and had Ralph, who married Margaret, daughter and heir to John Patmer, Esq., and had Geoffry (died 1425), who married Catherine, daughter and heir to Sir Thomas Bray, and had four sons and two daughters. Of these, the eldest was Thomas Jocelyn, Esq., living in the reign of Edward IV., who married Alice, daughter of Lewis Duke of Dukes in Essex, Esq., by his wife Anne, daughter of John Cotton, Esq., and had issue George, his heir, called Jocelyn the Courtier, who married Maud, daughter and heir to Edmond Bardolph,—Lord Bardolph,—and had one daughter and three sons. John Jocelyn, Esq.,—“auditor of the augmentations, upon the dissolution of the abbeys by King Henry VIII.,”—was son and heir to the last-mentioned George, and married Philippa, daughter of William Bradbury, of Littlebury in Essex; by whom he had Sir Thomas, of Hide Hall,—created a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of King Edward VI.,—who married Dorothy, daughter of Sir Geoffry Gales or Gates, Knt., and had issue;[4]one daughter marrying Roger Harlakenden, of Carnarthen in Kent, Esq.; and the fifth son being Henry Jocelyn, Esq., who married Anne, daughterand heir to Humphrey Torrell, otherwise Tyrrell, of Torrell’s Hall in Essex,—became seated there, and had six sons and six daughters. The second son of this family was Sir Thomas Jocelyn (father to our author), who was twice married. His first wife was Dorothy, daughter of John Frank, Esq.; by whom he had six sons and five daughters,—Torrell, born 28th May, 1690; Henry, and Henry, both died infants; Thomas, who died without issue, in 1635, at Bergen op Zoom; Edward, who, by a lady of Georgia, had a daughter Dorothy, and died at Smyrna in 1648; Benjamin, born 19th May, 1602; Anne, married to William Mildmay, Esq., by whom she had Robert, John, Anne, and Elizabeth; Dorothy, married to John Brewster, Esq., and left no issue; Elizabeth, married to Francis Neile, Esq., and had Francis, John, and Mary; Frances, born 26th March, 1600, and married Rev. Clement Vincent; and Mary, died unmarried. The second wife of Sir Thomas Jocelyn was Theodora, daughter to Edmond Cooke, of Mount Maschall in Kent, Esq.; and by her he had Henry, John, Theodora, and Thomazine. Torrell, the eldest son, married, first, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Richard Brooke of Cheshire,—heir to her grandfather (by the mother), Dr. Chaderton, Bishop of Lincoln,—by whom he had a daughter, Theodora, married to Samuel Fortrie, Esq.,[5]to whom our author dedicates the present volume, with acknowledgment of the “bounty” of his “honored friend and kinsman.”
The principal line of the family was continued by Richard, heir to Sir Thomas of Hide Hall; the said Richard being brother to our author, John Josselyn’s grandfather. In 1665, Sir Robert Jocelyn of Hide Hall was advanced to the dignity of baronet. The fifth son of this Sir Robert was Thomas; whose son, Robert Jocelyn, Esq., was bred to the law; was Solicitor-General and Attorney-General and Lord High Chancellor of Ireland; and created, in 1743, Baron Newport of Newport, and Viscount Jocelyn in 1755. Robert, son and successor of this nobleman, was created, in 1771, Earl of Roden, of High Roding, County of Tipperary; and was ancestor to the present Lord Roden.[6]
Our author, John Josselyn, made his first voyage to New England in 1638; arriving in Boston Harbor the 3d of July, and remaining with his brother at Black Point till the 10th of October of the following year. While at Boston, he paid his respects to the Governor and to Mr. Cotton, being the bearer to the latter of some poetical pieces from the poet Quarles; and, as he says, “being civilly treated by all I had occasion to converse with.” In the account of his first voyage, there is no appearance of that dislike to the Massachusetts government and people which is observable in the narrative of the second, and may there not unfairly be connected with his brother’s political and religious differences with Massachusetts.[7]His second voyagewas made in 1663. He arrived at Nantasket the 27th of July, and soon proceeded to his brother’s plantation, where he tells us he staid eight years, and got together the matter of the book before us. This was first printed in 1672, but occurs also with later dates. It was followed, in 1674, by “An Account of Two Voyages to New England; wherein you have the Setting-out of a ship, with the Charges; thePrices of all Necessaries for furnishing a Planter and his Family at his first Coming; a Description of the Country, Natives, and Creatures; the Government of the Countrey as it is now possessed by the English, &c. A large Chronological Table of the most Remarkable Passages, from the first Discovering of the Continent of America to the Year 1673.” 12mo, pp. 279. Reprinted in the third volume of the Third Series of the Collections of the Historical Society; which edition is quoted here. A large part of the “Voyages” is taken up with observations relating to natural history; and it is quite likely that the author tried in this second work to supply some of the defects of his “Rarities.” Compare especially the accounts of beasts of the earth, of birds, and of fishes; each of which is better done in the “Voyages.”
Josselyn was, it appears, a man of polite reading. He quotes Lucan, Pliny, and Du Bartas; he has Latin and Italian proverbs; he is acquainted with the writings of Mr. Perkins, that famous divine; with Van Helmont; with Sandys’s “Travels,” and Capt. John Smith’s. His curiosity in picking up “excellent medecines” points to an acquaintance with physic; of his practising which, there occur, indeed (pp. 48, 58, 63), several instances.[8]Nor ishe, by any means, uninterested in prescriptions for the kitchen; as see his elaboraterecipefor cooking eels (Voyages, p. 111), and also that (ibid., p. 190) for a compound liquor “that exceedspassada, the Nectar of the country;” which is made, he tells us, of “Syder, Maligo-Raisons, Milk, and Syrup of Clove-Gilliflowers.” But his curiosity in natural history, and especially in botany, is his chief merit; and this now gives almost all the value that is left to his books.[9]William Wood, the author of “New-England’s Prospect” (London, 1634[10]), was a better observer, generally, than Josselyn; but the latter makes up for his other short-comings by the particularity of his botanical information.
The “Voyages” was Josselyn’s last appearance in print. He was already advanced in years, and alludes to this at page 69 of the present book, where he says he shall refer the further investigation of a curious plant—of which a neighbor, “wandering in the woods to find out his strayed cattle,” had brought him a fragment—“to those that are younger, and better able to undergo the pains and trouble of finding it out.” “Henceforth,” he declares in his “Voyages,” p. 151, “you are to expect no more Relationsfrom me. I am now return’d into my Native Countrey; and, by the providence of the Almighty and the bounty of my Royal Soveraigness, am disposed to a holy quiet of study and meditation for the good of my soul; and being blessed with a transmentitation or change of mind, and weaned from the world, may take up for my word,non est mortale quod opto.”
We may suppose that a rude acquaintance with the more common or important animals of a new country will commence with the discovery of it. Thus the beginning of European knowledge of the marine animals of America goes back, doubtless, to the earliest fisheries of Newfoundland; and these began almost immediately after the discovery of the continent. Game and peltry were also likely to come to the knowledge of the earliest adventurers; and scattered among these, from the first, were doubtless men capable of regarding the world of new objects around them with an intelligent, if not a literate eye. Descriptions in this way, and specimens, at length reached Europe, and became known to the learned there—to Gesner, Clusius, and Aldrovandus—from as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. Without being naturalists, such observers as Heriot in Virginia (1585-6) and Wood in Massachusetts (1634) could give valuable accounts of what they saw; and more, it may well be, was due to the Christian missionaries, who accompanied or followed the adventurers, for the conversion of the heathen. Gabriel Sagard was one of these missionaries, arecolletor reformed Franciscan monk, who went from Paris toCanada in 1624, and spent two years in the country of the Hurons; publishing his “Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons” in 1632, and enlarging it in 1636 to “Histoire du Canada et Voyages que les Freres Mineurs recollets y ont faits pour la Conversion des Infidelles,” &c., in four books; of which the third treats of natural history,[11]and is cited by Messrs. Audubon and Bachmann (Vivip. Quadrupeds of N.A.,passim) for a good part of our more common and noticeableMammalia. Something considerable thus got to be known of marine animals of all sorts, and of quadrupeds. But it was much longer before our birds—if we except a very few, as the blue-jay and the turkey—came to the scientific knowledge of Europeans; and this remark is, as might be expected, at least equally true of our reptiles.
Quite as accidental, doubtless, was the beginning of European acquaintance with our plants. There are, indeed, traces of the knowledge of a few at a very early period. Dalechamp, Clusius, Lobel, and Alpinus—all authors of the sixteenth century—must be cited occasionally in any complete synonymy of ourFlora. The Indian-corn, the side-saddle flower (Sarracenia purpureaandS. flava), the columbine, the common milk-weed (Asclepias Cornuti), the everlasting (Antennaria margaritacea), and theArbor vitæ, were known to the just-mentioned botanists before 1600.Sarracenia flavawas sent either from Virginia, or possibly from some Spanish monkin Florida. Clusius’s figure of our well-known northernS. purpurea—of which he gives, however, only the leaves and base of the stem (Clus. Hist. Pl.,cit.GerardaJohnson)—was derived from a specimen furnished to him by one Mr. Claude Gonier, apothecary at Paris, who himself had it from Lisbon; whither we may suppose it was carried by some fisherman from the Newfoundland coast. The evening primrose (Œnothera biennis) was known in Europe, according to Linnæus, as early as 1614.Polygonum sagittatumandarifolium(tear-thumb) were figured by De Laet, probably from New-York specimens, in his “Novus Orbis,” 1633. Johnson’s edition of Gerard’s “Herbal” (1636)—which was possibly our author’s manual in the study of New-England plants—contains some dozen North-American species, furnished often from the garden of Mr. John Tradescant, who had other plants from “Virginia” beside the elegant one which bears his name; and John Parkinson—whose “Theatrum Botanicum” (1640) is declared by Tournefort to embrace a larger number of species than any work which had gone before it—describes, especially from Cornuti, a still larger number. But the first treatise especially concerned with North-American plants was that of the French author just mentioned; which, on several accounts, deserves particular attention.
John Robin—“second to none,” says Tournefort, “in the knowledge and cultivation of plants”—was placed in charge of the Royal Botanical Garden at Paris, about the year 1570; and Vespasian Robin, “a most diligentbotanist,” followed, in similar connection[12]with the larger garden founded by Lewis the Thirteenth. Both are said to have assisted the writer whose book we are to notice; but especially the latter,[13]who, there is little doubt, deserves credit for all the American species described in it.
The history of Canadian and other new plants—“Canadensium Plantarum, aliarumque nondum editarum Historia” of Jacobus Cornuti, Doctor of Medicine, of Paris—was printed in that city (pp. 238) in 1635, under the patronage just mentioned; and contains accounts, accompanied, in every case but one, with figures on copper, of thirty-seven of our plants; of which the meadow-rue is known to botanists asThalictrum Cornuti; and the common milkweed, asAsclepias Cornuti. Though himself not eminent as a botanist,[14]the work of Cornuti was valuablefor its elegant presentation of much that was new; and it will always deserve honorable remembrance in the history of ourFlora. There are several passages of it—as at pp. 5 and 7, and in the account of the two baneberries at p. 76, where we read, “Opacis et sylvestribus locis in eadem Americæ parte frequentissimum est geminum genus”—which look a little like a proper botanical collector’s notes on his specimens; and these specimens, and the others from the same region, may well have been results of the herborizing of that worthy Franciscan missionary, whose early observations on the natural history of Canada have been mentioned already above. Nor were the North-American plants possessed by Cornuti entirely confined to this region; for he speaks at the end (p. 214) of his having received a root,ex notha Anglia, as he strangely calls it, known, it appears, by the name ofSerpentaria, or, in the vernacular,Snaqroel,—a sure remedy for the bite of a huge and most pernicious serpentin notha Anglia,—which was no doubt the snake-root so famous once as a cure for the bite of a rattlesnake, and one of the numerous varieties ofNabalus albus(L.) Hook., if not, as Pursh supposed, what is now thevar. Serpentaria, Gray. But some view of the scantiness of scientific knowledge of ourFlora, near forty years after Cornuti, may be had by reckoning the number of species for which Bauhin’s “Pinax”and “Prodromus” (1671) are cited by Linnæus in the “Species Plantarum.” Most of them are Southern plants; and the few decidedly Northern ones which meet us—asCornus canadensis,Uvularia perfoliata,Trillium erectum,Arum triphyllum, andAdiantum pedatum—are all indicated, by Bauhin’s phrase, as from Brazil!
We have nothing illustrating theFloraof New England from Cornuti till Josselyn. In Virginia, Mr. John Banister, a correspondent of Ray’s, began to botanize probably not long after the middle of the seventeenth century. He was succeeded by several eminent names; as Mark Catesby, F.R.S. (born 1679), John Clayton, Esq. (born 1685), and John Mitchell, M.D., F.R.S.,—a contemporary of the other two,—who together gave to the botany of Virginia a distinguished lustre; as did Cadwalader Colden, Esq. (born 1688),—a selection from whose correspondence has been lately edited by Dr. Gray,—to that of New York; John Bartram (born 1701), “American botanist to his Britannic Majesty,” to that of Pennsylvania; and, somewhat later, Alexander Garden, M.D., F.R.S. (born 1728), to that of South Carolina. Josselyn himself is, indeed, little more than a herbalist; but it is enough that he gets beyond that entirely unscientific character. He certainly botanized, and made botanical use of Gerard and his other authorities. The credit belongs to him of indicating several genera as new which were so, and peculiar to the AmericanFlora. It may at least be said, that, at the time he wrote, there is no reason to suppose that any other person knew as much as he did of the botany of NewEngland. “The plants in New England,” he says in his “Voyages,” p. 59, “for the variety, number, beauty, and virtues, may stand in competition with the plants of any countrey in Europe. Johnson hath added to Gerard’s ‘Herbal’ three hundred, and Parkinson mentioneth many more. Had they been in New England, they might have found a thousand, at least, never heard of nor seen by any Englishman before.”[15]Nor did our author fail to adorn his “Rarities” with recognizable figures, as well as descriptions, of some of these new American plants; andhis arrangement is also creditable to his botanical knowledge. By this arrangement, his collections are distinguished into—
1. “Such plants as are common with us in England.”2. “Such plants as are proper to the country.”3. “Such plants as are proper to the country, and have no name.”4. “Such plants as have sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New England.”
The last of these divisions is the most valuable part of Josselyn’s account, as it affords the only testimony that there is to the first notice among us of a number of now naturalized weeds, which it is an interesting question to separate from the more important class of plants truly indigenous in, and common to, both hemispheres; and the author’s treatment of the latter—as indeed of the other two lists mentioned above—shows that he was competent, in a measure, to reckon the former. This furnishes a date, and an early one; and there is no other till 1785, when Dr. Manasseh Cutler’s Memoir, to be spoken of, enables us to limit the appearance of some other species not mentioned by Josselyn.
There is no work of any size or importance on New-England plants, after Josselyn, for the whole century which followed. We were not, indeed, without men in distinguished connection with the European scientific world. The most eminent New-England family gained honors in science, as well as in the conduct of affairs. John Winthrop the younger, eldest son of the first Governor of Massachusetts,—and the “heir,” says Savage, “of all hisfather’s talents, prudence, and virtues, with a superior share of human learning,”[16]—was himself the first Governor of Connecticut, and had, in this connection, a certain scientific position and reputation. “The great Mr. Boyle, Bishop Wilkins, with several other learned men,” says Dr. Eliot, “had proposed to leave England, and establish a society for promoting natural knowledge in the new colony of which Mr. Winthrop, their intimate friend and associate, was appointed Governor. Such men were too valuable to lose from Great Britain; and, Charles II. having taken them under his protection, the society was there established, and obtained the title of the Royal Society of London.... Mr. Winthrop sent over many specimens of the productions of this country, with his remarks upon them: ‘and, by an order of the Royal Society, he was in a particular manner invited to take upon himself the charge of being the chief correspondent in the West, as Sir Philiberto Vernatti was in the East Indies.’ ‘His name,’ says the same writer, Dr. Cromwell Mortimer, Secretary of the Royal Society, in his flattering dedication of the fortieth volume of the Philosophical Transactions to the Governor’s grandson, ‘had he put it to his writings, would have been as universally known as the Boyles’s, the Wilkins’s, and Oldenburghs’, and been handed down to us with similar applause.’”[17]There is, in the volume of Philosophical Transactions for 1670, “An Extract of aLetter written by John Winthrop, Esq., Governor of Connecticut in New England, to the Publisher, concerning some Natural Curiosities of those Parts; especially a very strange and curiously-contrived Fish, sent for the Repository of the Royal Society” (pp. 3); in which are mentioned, as sent, specimens of scrub-oak; “bark of tree with fir-balsam, which grows in Nova Scotia, and, as I hear, in the more easterly part of New England;” pods of milk-weed, “used to stuff pillows and cushions;” and “a branch of the tree called the cotton-tree, bearing a kind of down, which also is not fit to spin.”
Fitz John Winthrop, Esq., F.R.S. (died 1707), son of the last, and also Governor of Connecticut, is said to have been “famous for his philosophical” (that is, scientific) “knowledge.”[18]And the second Governor’s nephew, John Winthrop, Esq., F.R.S. (died 1747), who left this country and passed the latter part of his life in England, is declared by the author of the dedication already above cited, to have “increased the riches of their” (the Royal Society’s) “repository with more than six hundred curious specimens, chiefly in the mineral kingdom; accompanied with an accurate account of each particular.” “Since Mr. Colwell,” it is added, “the founder of the Museum of the Royal Society, you have been the benefactor who has given the most numerous collection.” Dr. John Winthrop, F.R.S. (died 1779), Hollisian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, N.E., whose important papers on astronomicaland other related phenomena are to be found in the Philosophical Transactions, was of another line of the same family.
Paul Dudley, Esq., F.R.S. (born 1675), son of Gov. Joseph Dudley, and himself Chief Justice of Massachusetts, was author of several papers in the Philosophical Transactions; one of which is an “Account of the Poison-wood Tree in New-England” (vol. xxxi. p. 135); and another, “Observations on some Plants in New-England, with Remarkable Instances of the Nature and Power of Vegetation” (vol. xxxiii. p. 129). This last is of only seven pages, and of little scientific account: though we learn from it, that, in 1726, when Mr. Dudley wrote, the Pearmain, Kentish Pippin, and Golden Russetin, were esteemed apples here, and the Orange and Bergamot cultivated pears;[19]that, in one town in 1721, they made three thousand, and in another near ten thousand barrels of cider; and that, to speak of “trees of the wood,” he knew of abutton-wood tree which measured nine yards in girth, and made twenty-two cords of wood; and of an ash, which, at a yard from the ground, was fourteen feet eight inches in girth. He also expresses an intention to treat separately the evergreens of New England; and this treatise, which was possibly more valuable than the one just noticed, was in the possession of Peter Collinson, the eminent patron of horticulture, and was given by him to J. F. Gronovius; but has not, that I am aware of, appeared in print.[20]
It is likely that the early physicians of New England gave special attention to those simples of the country, the virtues of which were known to the savages; and perhaps it was partly in this way that the Rev. Jared Eliot (born 1685), minister of Killingworth in Connecticut,—who is called by Dr. Allen “the first physician of his day,”—is also designated, both by him and by Eliot, a botanist; and by the latter, “the first in New England.” There is no doubt he was a friend of Dr. Franklin’s, and a scientific agriculturist according to the knowledge of his day; and he is said to have introduced the white mulberry into Connecticut.[21]His Agricultural Essays went through more than one edition, but is now rare. Mr. Eliot died while our next character, the first native New-England botanist who deserves the name, was a student of Yale College.
Manasseh Cutler, LL.D. (born 1743), was minister of the Hamlet in Ipswich—afterwards incorporated as the town of Hamilton—fifty-one years, and was also a member of the Medical Society of Massachusetts. He is author of “An Account of some of the Vegetable Productions naturally growing in this part of America, botanically arranged,” which makes nearly a hundred pages of the first volume of the Memoirs of the American Academy, 1785. In the introduction to this paper, the author speaks of Canada and the Southern States having had attention given to their productions, both by some of their own inhabitants and by European naturalists; while “that extensive tract of country which lies between them, including several degrees of latitude, and exceedingly diversified in its surface and soil, seems still to remain unexplored.” He attributes the neglect, in part, to this,—“that botany has never been taught in any of our colleges,” but principally to the prevalent opinion of its unprofitableness in common life. The latter error he combats with the then important observation, that, “though all the medicinal properties and economical uses of plants are not discoverable from those characters by which they are systematically arranged, yet the celebrated Linnæus has found that the virtues of plants may be, in a considerable degree, and most safely, determined by theirnaturalcharacters: for plants of the samenaturalclass are in some measure similar; those of the samenaturalorder have a still nearer affinity; and those of the fame genus have very seldom been found to differ in their medical virtues” (p. 397).This shows, perhaps, that Dr. Cutler appreciated (for theItalicsin the just-quoted passage are his own) that adumbration of a natural system which was afforded or suggested by the artificial; and his instances—theGramineæ, theBorraginaceæ, theUmbelliferæ, theLabiatæ, theCruciferæ, theMalvaceæ, theCompositæ, &c.; though these are cited under the divisions, not of the natural, but of the sexual system—are still more to the point. There are other observations of interest; and the suggestion is made, that persons should collect the plants of their districts, and send them from time to time to the Academy.
Dr. Cutler was thus, possibly, the first to suggest a botanical chair in our colleges, and a generalherbariumto illustrate theFloraof New England; and perhaps it was this last which led him to propose a still more important undertaking. “It has long been my intention,” he says in a letter to Prof. Swartz, of Upsal, dated 15th October, 1802, “to publish a botanical work, comprising the plants of the northern and eastern States; and [I] have been collecting materials for that purpose. But numerous avocations, and a variety of other engagements, has occasioned delay. It is, however, still my intention, if my health permits, to do it. But, at this time, far less than in years past, there is very little encouragement given here to publications of this kind.”[22]
About three hundred and seventy plants are indicated in the published “Account” of Dr. Cutler. It was not to beexpected, that, in this beginning, numerous mistakes should not be made. It could not possibly have been otherwise. There is still evidence enough of the author’s genius, which perhaps needed only opportunity and encouragement to anticipate a part of what botany now owes to a Nuttall, a Torrey, and a Gray. The “Account” was favorably received by other botanists of the time, both in this country and abroad. In a letter of Muhlenberg to Cutler, dated 9th February, 1791, the former says, “Not till a few months ago, I was favored with the first volume of the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, printed at Boston, 1785. Amongst other valuable pieces, I found your ‘Account of Indigenous Vegetables, botanically arranged;’ with which I was infinitely pleased, as this was the first work that gives a systematical account of New-England plants. Being a great friend to botany, and having studied it in my leisure-hours upwards of fourteen years in Pennsylvania, I know the difficulty of arranging the American plants according tothe Linnæan system; and I was always eager to hear of some gentleman engaged in similar researches, that, by joining hands, we might do something towards enlarging American Botany.... This is the reason why I intrude upon your leisure-hours, and crave for your acquaintance and friendship.”[23]Drs. Withering and Stokes, of England, were other correspondents of Cutler, and furnished him with important observations upon his printed Memoir, besides specimens;as did also Swartz, and, it appears, Payshull of Sweden. Dr. Stokes followed up his various suggestions for the improvement of the Memoir, by proposing to dedicate a plant, which he took to be new, to its author. “A plant,” he says, “like a woolly heath, and which I wished to callCutleria ericoides, turns out to beHudsonia ericoides. I hope, however, your herborizations may furnish a new genus for you, not likely to be disturbed.”—Letters of Stokes to Cutler, from “Feb. 14 ’91, to Aug. 17, ’93.”[24]
But Dr. Cutler’s printed memoir on the plants of New England is much surpassed in interest by his manuscript volumes of descriptions, still extant. These manuscript volumes commence with “Book I., 1783,” and continue, so far as I have seen them, to 1804. The late Mr. Oakes possessed six of these books; and two were given to me by my valued friend, the late Dr. T. W. Harris. They are generally entitled, “Descriptions and Notes on American Indigenous Plants,” and contain a vast number of observations and analyses, sometimes accompanied by pen-and-ink sketches. This was evidently the material accumulated for the author’sFloraabove mentioned; and the following extracts will serve to show that he was in many respects qualified to undertake such a work. Thus, in describing the several hickories, he points out those differences fromJuglans, upon which Nuttall afterwards constituted hisgenusCarya. Again, in the same volume,—that for 1789,—there is aN. Gen. Anonymos, minutely described in several pages, which is no other thanThesium umbellatum, L., afterwards distinguished by Nuttall as his genusComandra. Again, underAnonymos, Yellow-Sandbind, there is a full description of what Nuttall after namedHudsonia tomentosa. The same volume shows that the author had anticipated Prof. Gray in referringOrchis fimbriata, as it was called by Pursh and other botanists, toO. psychodes, L.; and the remark is also made thatO. laceraMichx.,—which Muhlenberg and our other writers had mistakenly referred toO. psychodes, till Dr. Gray corrected the error,—“must be a new species,” which it then certainly was. Again, there is anotherAnomolosdescribed at length, which is the same afterwards constituted by Nuttall his genusMicrostylis. SoCampanula humida(Cutler mss.) is what Pursh designated, long after,C. aparinoides. Again, in another volume (for 1800), he anticipates Pursh by proposing for our water-shield the nameBrasenia ovalifolia; and, in yet another, he is before Bigelow in describing as a new species what the latter, many years later, published asPrunus obovata. This may suffice to indicate the merits of the botanist of Ipswich Hamlet. A little shrub-willow, with clean, shining leaves, and modest catkins,—inhabiting, almost everywhere, the alpine regions of the White Mountains, and gathered by him there, before any other botanist had penetrated those solitudes,—still reminds us of his name, which deserves to be remembered by his countrymen.
After Cutler, there appeared nothing of importance[25]on our botany, till the present elder school of New-England botanists—a school characterized by the names of an Oakes, a Boott, and an Emerson—was founded, now more than forty years ago, by the classicalFlorulaof Bigelow.
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