FOOTNOTES:
[1] Willis, in N. E. Geneal. Register, vol. ii. p. 204; and New Series of the same, vol. i. p. 31. Williamson, Hist. of Maine, vol. i. p. 682.
[2] Dr. T. W. Harris, in N. E. Geneal. Register, vol. ii. p. 306, has corrected the mistake of Williamson and other writers as to Henry Josselyn of Scituate’s being of kin to Mr. Josselyn of Black Point; and Mr. Willis, who had adopted the same error in his first paper, already cited, now admits, in his second, that there is not “any evidence that” the proprietor of Black Point “left any children, or ever had any.”
[3] Letter of Rev. J. Hunter, 12th April, 1859.
[4] See also a Pedigree of Joselyne from the Visitation of Hertfordshire in 1614, furnished by Mr. S. G. Drake to the New-England Genealogical Register, vol. xiv. p. 16. This is probably one of the sources from which Lodge’s account was derived.
[5] Lodge, Peerage of Ireland, vol. iii. p. 65, and ante.
[6] Lodge, ubi supra. Annual Register, 1771, p. 174.
[7] But there is no doubt that the author was himself as far from sharing in the serious English thought of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay as he was from joining in their evangelical faith. Yet there is hardly more than one place in either of his books (Voyages, pp. 180-2) where this is offensively brought forward. It is worthy of remark, however, that Josselyn’s family, in England, was attached rather to the Puritan side. “His family connections,” says Mr. Hunter, in the letter already referred to, “appear to have been adherents to the cause of the Parliament; particularly the Harlakendens, in whose regiment a Jocelyn, named Ralph, was a chaplain.” Nor is this all. “In the year 1663,” continues the learned authority just cited, “there was a slight insurrectionary movement in the North; which was easily put down by the government, and the leaders executed. In a manuscript list of persons who were either openly engaged, or who were vehemently suspected of being favorers of the design, I find in the latter class the name of Capt. John Jossline.” This plot was not discovered till January, 1664; and our John Josselyn “departed from London,” as he says at page one of this volume, “upon an invitation of my only brother,” the 28th of May of the year previous. But, if it be possible that our author was the person intended in the manuscript list as one strongly suspected of being engaged in a design against the Royal Government, the evident uncertainty of this is too great to permit us to discredit his own exposure of his political leanings,—as in the Voyages, p. 197, where, speaking of Sir F. Gorges, he says, “And, when he was between three and fourscore years of age, did personally engage in our royal martyr’s service, and particularly in the siege of Bristow; and was plundered and imprisoned several times, by reason whereof he was discountenanced by the pretended Commissioners for Forraign Plantations,” and so forth,—or in the face of another passage to be quoted further on, in which he acknowledges “the bounty of his royal sovereigness,” to question the sincerity—which there is nothing in either of his books to throw doubt upon—of his general adhesion to the Royalist side. “The family in Hertfordshire,” says Mr. Hunter, “were nonconformists; but the spirit of nonconformity seems to have spent itself at the death of Sir Strange Jocelyn, the second baronet, who died in 1734. But we may trace the Puritan influence in the present Earl of Roden, who is a conspicuous member of the religious body in England called the Evangelical.”—Ms. ut sup.
[8] And see the Voyages, p. 187, for an account of a “Barbarie-Moor under cure” of the author, when he “perceived that the Moor had one skin more than Englishmen. The skin that is basted to the flesh is bloudy, and of the same Azure colour with the veins, but deeper than the colour of our Europeans’ veins. Over this is an other skin, of a tawny colour, and upon that [the] Epidermis, or Cuticula,—the flower of the skin, which is that Snake’s cast; and this is tawny also. The colour of the blew skin mingling with the tawny, makes them appear black.” Dr. Mitchell, the botanist of Virginia, has a paper upon the same topic,—the cause of the negro’s color,—in the Philosophical Transactions; but this appears less in accordance with more recent researches (Prichard, Nat. Hist. of Man, p. 81) than Josselyn’s observations.
[9] “His book is a curiosity, sometimes worth examining, but seldom to be implicitly relied on.”—Savage, in Winthrop, N. E., vol. i. p. 267, note.
[10] Reprinted, the third edition, with an introductory essay and some notes; Boston, 1764,—the edition made use of in these notes.
[11] Biographie Universelle, in loco.
[12] He is called Botanicus Regius by Cornuti, p. 22; and the same title is given to both the Robins, in the printed catalogue of plants cultivated by them. Tournefort indicates the office of Vespasian Robin, at the new Botanic Garden, as follows: “Brossæus ... primus Horti præfectus, studiosis plantas indigitandi numeri præposuit Vespasianum Robinum diligentissimum Botanicum.”—Inst. Rei Herb., vol. i. p. 48. And the recent writer in the Biographic Universelle, says, more expressly, that the royal ordonnance establishing the garden names Vespasian Robin “sub-demonstrator” of botany, with a stipend of two hundred francs yearly. According to this writer, the two Robins were not, as has been said, father and son, but brothers; and Vespasian the elder. This one must have reached a great age, as the celebrated Morrison, who visited France in 1640, and remained there twelve years, calls himself his disciple.—Biog. Universelle, in loco.
[13] Tournefort, ubi supra.
[14] Cornuti autem parum fuit in plantarum cognitione versatus, ut manifestum est ex ineptis appellationibus quibus utitur in Enchiridio Botanico Parisiensi, et descriptionibus speciosis ab Herbariorum stylo tamen alienis.—Tournef. Inst., vol. i. p. 43. Compare, as to the botanical merits of Cornuti, the writer in Biographic Universelle, who says that Cornuti’s terminology, to which Tournefort took exception, was that of Lobel; and farther, that the catalogue—Enchiridium Botanicum Parisiense—which is annexed to Cornuti’s larger work, is in several respects creditable to him.—Biog. Univ., in loco.
[15] Mention of New-England plants may be found in earlier writers than Cornuti or Josselyn; but what is said is now rarely available. Gosnold’s expedition was in 1602; and the writer of the account of it tells us that the island upon which his party proposed to settle (Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands) was covered with “oaks, ashes, beech, walnut, witch-hazel, sassafrage, and cedars, with divers others of unknown names;” beside “wild pease, young sassafrage, cherry-trees, vines, eglantine, gooseberry-bushes, hawthorn, honeysuckles, with others of the like quality;” as also “strawberries, rasps, ground-nuts, alexander, surrin, tansy, &c., without count.”—Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. xxviii. p. 76. And so the writer of Mourt’s Relation, in 1620, speaks of “sorrel, yarrow, carvel, brook-lime, liverwort, watercresses, &c.”, as noticed, “in winter,” however, at Plymouth.—Hist. Coll. vol. viii. p. 221. There is much here which is true enough, though the “eglantine” of the first writer is an evident mistake, as doubtless also the “carvel” of the other; but we have no reason to suppose that either of these passages ever had any scientific value. Josselyn, so far as his Botany goes, does not belong to this class of writers. There are important parts of his account of our plants, in which we know with certainty what he intended to tell us; and, farther, that this was worth the telling. And the credit which fairly belongs to the new genera of American plants, in some sort indicated by him, shall illustrate as well those other portions of his work where what he meant is a matter rather of deduction from his particulars, such as they are, in the light of his only here-and-there-cited authorities, than of plain fact. His English names—common, and perhaps often indefinite, as they strike us—had more of scientific value, in botanical hands at least, when he wrote, than now; and, there is good reason to suppose, were meant to indicate that the plants intended, or in some cases the genera to which they belonged, were the same with those published, under the same names, by Gerard, Johnson, and Parkinson.
[16] Winthrop’s Journal, by Savage, edit. 1, vol. i. p. 64, note. See also Bancroft’s character of the younger Winthrop, in History of the United States, vol. ii. p. 52.
[17] Eliot, Biog. Dict., in loco.
[18] Eliot, Biog. Dict., in loco.
[19] Interleaved Almanacs of 1646-48, cited by Savage (Winthrop, N. E., vol. ii. p. 332), mention “Tankard” and “Kreton” (perhaps Kirton) apples, as well as Russetins, Pearmains, and Long-Red apples; beside “the great pears,” and apricots, as grown here. In the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay (Records of Mass., vol. i. p. 24), there is an undated memorandum, “To provide to send for Newe England ... stones of all sorts of fruites; as peaches, plums, filberts, cherries, pear, aple, quince kernells,” &c., which the “First General Letter of the Governor,” &c., of the 17th April, 1629, again makes mention of (ibid., p. 392); and Josselyn (Voyages, p. 189) remarks on the “good fruit” reared from such kernels. But, if this were the only source of our ancestors’ English fruit, the names which they gave to the seedlings must have been vague.—For other early notices of cultivated fruit-trees, see Savage Gen. Dict. 4, p. 258, and the same, 4, p. 621. Saml. Sewall, jun. Esq., of Brookline, had trees grafted with ‘Drew’s Russet,’ and ‘Golden Russet’ apples, in 1724. (Gen. Reg. 16, p. 65.)
[20] Gronov. Fl. Virg., edit. 2. In Mr. Dillwyn’s (unpublished) “Account of the Plants cultivated by the late Peter Collinson,” from his own catalogue and other manuscripts, I find Collinson quoting Mr. Dudley’s paper on Plants of New England, above mentioned; but not that on the Evergreens.—Hortus Collins., p. 41.
[21] Eliot, Biog. Dict., and Allen, Amer. Biog. Dict., in locis.
[22] Mss. Cutler, penes me.
[23] Mss. Cutler, penes me.
[24] Mss. Cutler, penes me.
[25] The late Dr. Waterhouse, Professor of Medicine at Cambridge, read lectures on Natural History to his classes as early as 1788, and published the botanical part of these lectures in the Monthly Anthology, 1804-8; reprinting this in 1811, with the title of the Botanist (Boston, 8vo, pp. 228). In the preface to this volume, the author’s are claimed to have been the first public lectures on Natural History given in the United States. The Massachusetts Professorship of Botany and Entomology was founded in 1805, and the Botanical Garden in 1807; but the eminent naturalist who first filled the chair left little behind him to bear witness to his acknowledged “learning and genius.”—Quincy, Hist. Harv. Univ., vol. ii. p. 330. The studies of Peck were not, however, confined to the Fauna and Flora of New England; and his distinguished successors in the lecture-room and the botanical garden—Mr. Nuttall, the late Dr. Harris, and Professor Gray—may be said to have maintained a like general, rather than local character, in the entomological and botanical investigations pursued at the University.
[26] This house was one Mr. Robert Gibbs’s “of an ancient family in Devonshire,” says Farmer (Geneal. Reg., p. 120); and it stood on Fort Hill, the way leading to it becoming afterwards known as Gibbs’s Lane, and a wharf at the waterside, belonging to the property, as Gibbs’s Wharf. Mr. W. B. Trask, who obligingly examined for me the early deeds concerning this estate in Suffolk Registry, furnishes a memorandum, that on the 6th June, 1671, Robert Gibbs of Boston, merchant, conveys to Edward and Elisha Hutchinson, in trust, for Elizabeth, wife of said Robert, during her life, and after her decease to such child or children as he shall have by her, his land and house on Fort Hill, with warehouse on wharf, ‘which land was formerly my grandfather, Henry Webb’s.’ The wife of said Robert Gibbs was daughter to Jacob Sheafe by Margaret, daughter to Henry Webb, mercer. Sampson Sheafe, a Provincial councillor of New Hampshire, and the ancestor of a family of long standing there, married another daughter of Jacob Sheafe. Mr. Gibbs was father to the Rev. Henry Gibbs, minister of Watertown, and had other children; and the family continues to this day.
[27] Compare the author’s Voyages, pp. 19, 161, 173, for other notices of Boston, and as to the first of these, which represents the town (in 1638) as “rather a village, ... there being not above twenty or thirty houses,” see the note in Savage’s Winthrop, edit. 1, vol. i. p. 267.
[28] Mr. Henry Josselyn was probably living at Black Point in 1638, when his brother first visited it (Voyages, p. 20). It was then the estate (by grant from the council at Plymouth) and residence of Captain Thomas Cammock; but he, dying in 1643, bequeathed it, except five hundred acres which were reserved to his wife, to Josselyn, who, marrying the widow, succeeded to the whole property, which was described as containing fifteen hundred acres (Willis infra), but is called by Sullivan five thousand (History of Maine, p. 128). In 1658, this and other adjoining tracts were erected into a town by Massachusetts, under the name of Scarborough, which is thus further noticed by our author in his Voyages, p. 201, as “the town of Black Point, consisting of about fifty dwelling-houses, and a Magazine, or Doganne, scatteringly built. They have store of neat and horses, of sheep near upon seven or eight hundred, much arable and marsh, salt and fresh, and a corn-mill.”—Comp. Williamson’s Hist. of Maine, vol. i. pp. 392, 666; Willis in Geneal. Register, vol. i. p. 202.
[29] Empyema is a result of disease of the lungs. See Voyages, p. 121.
[30] Compare the accounts of the first appearance of the country by the Rev. Francis Higginson and Mr. Thomas Graves, both well-qualified observers, in New-England’s Plantation, London, 1630; reprinted in Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 117. And see Wood’s New England’s Prospect, a book which our author was probably acquainted with; as compare p. 4 of Wood (edit. 1764) with the beginning of [p. 3] of the Rarities, and some other places in both.
[31] The earliest ascents of the White Mountains were those made by Field and others in 1642, of which we have some account in Winthrop’s Journal (by Savage, edit. 1, vol. ii. pp. 67, 89). Darby Field, “an Irishman living about Pascataquack,” has the honor of being the first European who set foot upon the summit of Mount Washington. He appears at Exeter in 1639, and was at Dover in 1645, and died there in 1649, leaving a widow, and, it is said, children (A. H. Quint, N. E. Geneal. Reg., vol. vi. p. 38). It seems likely, from his account, that Field, on reaching the Indian town in the Saco Valley, “at the foot of the hill” where the “two branches of Saco river met,” pursued his way up the valley either of Rocky Branch or of Ellis River, till he gradually attained to the region of dwarf firs, on what is known as Boott’s Spur, which is between the “valley” called Oakes’s Gulf, in which the “Mount Washington” branch of the Saco has its head, and the valley in which the Rocky Branch rises (see G. P. Bond’s Map of the White Mountains). There is no other way that shall fulfil the conditions of the narrative except that over Boott’s Spur; but of the three streams, that is, “the two branches of Saco River,” which come together at or near the probable site of the Indian town, the Rocky Branch is the shortest, and its valley the most ascending. Field repeated his visit, with some others, “about a month after;” and later, in the same year, the mountains were visited by the worshipful Thomas Gorges, Esq., Deputy-Governor, and Richard Vines, Esq., Councillor of the Province of Maine, of which Winthrop takes notice at p. 89. Whether Josselyn went up himself, or had his account from others, does not appear. But his calling the mountains “inaccessible but by the gullies,” leaves it at least supposable, that he, or the party from which he got his information (perhaps Gorges’s), instead of gradually ascending the long ridges, or spurs, penetrated into one of the gulfs (as they are there called), or ravines, of the eastern side; the walls of which are exceedingly steep, and literally inaccessible in many parts, except by the gullies. The “large level or plain of a day’s journey over, whereon grows nothing but moss,” is noticed in Winthrop’s account of Gorges’s ascent, but not in that of Field’s; and this plain—which doubtless includes what has since been called “Bigelow’s Lawn” (lying immediately under the south-eastern side of the summit of Mount Washington), but understood also, in Gorges’s account, to extend northward as far as the “Lake of the Clouds”—furnishes another ground for supposing that the last-mentioned explorer, or, at least, Josselyn, may have penetrated the mountain by one of its eastern ravines; several of which head in the great plain mentioned, while that is rather remote from what we have taken for Field’s “ridge.” Our author is the only authority for the “pond of clear water in the midst of” the top of Mount Washington; though a somewhat capacious spring, which was well known there before the putting-up of the house on the summit, may have been larger once; or he may rather have mistaken, or misremembered, the position of the Lake of the Clouds.
[32] Compare, as to the insulation of the tract understood by Josselyn as New England, Palfrey, Hist. N. E., vol. i. pp. 1, 2, and note, and the accompanying map.
[33] See the author’s larger account of the natives in his Voyages, pp. 123-150.
[34] There is a much fuller account—to be noticed again—of our birds, in the Voyages, pp. 95-103. Wood’s (N. E. Prospect, chap, viii.) is also curious. In the notes which immediately follow, on the birds, beasts, fishes, and reptiles, the oldest writers on our natural history will be found often to explain or illustrate each other.
[35] Chimney-swallow.
[36] “The pilhannaw is the king of birds of prey in New England. Some take him to be a kind of eagle; others for the Indian ruck,—the biggest bird that is, except the ostrich. One Mr. Hilton, living at Pascataway, had the hap to kill one of them. Being by the sea-side, he perceived a great shadow over his head, the sun shining out clear. Casting up his eyes, he saw a monstrous bird soaring aloft in the air; and, of a sudden, all the ducks and geese (there being then a great many) dived under water, nothing of them appearing but their heads. Mr. Hilton, having made readie his piece, shot and brought her down to the ground. How he disposed of her, I know not; but had he taken her alive, and sent her over into England, neither Bartholomew nor Sturbridge Fair could have produced such another sight.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 95. These notices have been taken to be sufficient by some writers to show the probable existence of “a bird of prey, very large and bold, on the back of some of our American plantations.” But our author’s account indicates clearly a crested eagle, which we cannot explain by any thing nearer home than the yzquautli, or crested vulture of Mexico and the countries south of it (Falco Harpyja, Gmel.); two notices of which (cited by Linnæus) had been published some twenty years before Josselyn wrote, and may have been supposed by him to be applicable to a large bird which he had heard of as inhabiting mountains about Ossipee. The great heron—an inhabitant of the coast, and so uncommon inland that “one ... shot in the upper parts of New Hampshire was described to” Wilson “as a great curiosity” (Amer. Ornith., by Brewer, p. 555)—has the size and the crest of Josselyn’s bird; and, if this last was only (as is possible) the name of a confused conception made up from several accounts of large birds, the heron may well be thought to have had a share in it.
[37] “Of these, sometimes there will be forty, threescore and a hundred, of a flock; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Their feeding is acorns, hawes, and berries: some of them get a haunt to frequent English corn. In winter, when the snow covers the ground, they resort to the seashore to look for shrimps, and such small fishes, at low tides. Such as love turkey-hunting must follow it in winter, after a new-fallen snow, when he may follow them by their tracks. Some have killed ten or a dozen in half a day. If they can be found towards an evening, and watched where they perch,—if one come about ten or eleven of the clock,—he may shoot as often as he will: they will sit, unless they be slenderly wounded. These turkies remain all the year long. The price of a good turkey-cock is four shillings; and he is well worth it, for he may be in weight forty pounds; a hen, two shillings.”—Wood, N. Eng. Prospect, chap. viii. See also Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 99.
[38] “The geese of the country be of three sorts. First, a brant goose; which is a goose almost like the wild goose in England. The price of one of these is sixpence. The second kind is a white goose, almost as big as an English tame goose. These come in great flocks about Michaelmas: sometimes there will be two or three thousand in a flock. Those continue six weeks, and so fly to the southward; returning in March, and staying six weeks more, returning to the northward. The price of one of these is eightpence. The third kind of geese is a great grey goose, with a black neck, and a black and white head; strong of flight: and these be a great deal bigger than the ordinary geese of England; some very fat, and, in the spring, full of feathers, that the shot can scarce pierce them. Most of these geese remain with us from Michaelmas to April. They feed in the sea upon grass in the bays at low water, and gravel, and in the woods of acorns; having, as other fowl have, their pass and repass to the northward and southward. The accurate marksmen kill of these both flying and sitting. The price of a grey goose is eighteen-pence.”—Wood, N. E. Prospect, l. c. The white goose here mentioned is probably the snow-goose; upon which compare Nuttall, Mass. Ornith., Water-Birds, p. 344. Josselyn (Voyages, p. 100) says the brant and the gray goose “are best meat; the white are lean and tough, and live a long time; whereupon the proverb, ‘Older than a white goose:’” which is not supported by Wood or later writers. The snow-goose has become much less frequent with us since the settlement of the country. The great grey goose of Wood is our well-known Canada goose.
[39] This was the best that our author could say of the eagles of New England. Wood assists us once more here: “The eagles of the country be of two sorts,—one like the eagles that be in England; the other is something bigger, with a great white head and white tail. These be commonly called gripes.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. The first spoken of by Wood—and perhaps, also, what Josselyn names last—may be the common or ring-tailed eagle, now known to be the young of the golden eagle. The second of Wood, and first of our author, is without doubt, the bald eagle; the (so to say) tyrannical habits of which bird are sufficiently well known, at least in the vivid pages of Wilson. See the Voyages, p. 96; where we learn also that “hawkes there are of several kinds; as goshawks, falcons, laniers, sparrow-hawkes, and a little black hawke highly prized by the Indians, who wear them on their heads, and is accounted of worth sufficient to ransom a sagamour. They are so strangely couragious and hardie that nothing flyeth in the air that they will not bind with. I have seen them tower so high, that they have been so small that scarcely could they be taken by the eye” (p. 95-6). Wood makes like mention of this little black hawk (New-Eng. Prospect, l. c.); and R. Williams (Key into the Language of the Indians of N. E., in Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 220) calls it “sachim, a little bird about the bigness of a swallow, or less; to which the Indians give that name, because of its sachem or prince-like courage and command over greater birds: that a man shall often see this small bird pursue and vanquish and put to flight the crow and other birds far bigger than itself.” This was our well-known king-bird; and Josselyn, on the same page, tells us of “a small ash-colour bird that is shaped like a hawke, with talons and beak, that falleth upon crowes; mounting up into the air after them, and will beat them till they make them cry:” which was, perhaps, the king-bird’s half-cousin, as Wilson calls him,—the purple-martin.
[40] Nuttall (Manual, Water-Birds, p. 520) says that the young of the red-throated diver is called cobble in England. Our author elsewhere (Voyages, p. 101) makes mention of the “wobble” and the “wilmote” (that is, guillemot) as distinct; but his wilmot was “a kind of teal.”
[41] “He maketh a noise sometimes like a sow-gelder’s horn.”—N. Eng. Prospect, l. c.
[42] The first is the great-horned or cat-owl; the second, probably, the mottled or little screech-owl, which Wood notices more fully as “small, speckled like a partridge, with ears” (l. c.); and the third, the Acadian or little owl. There are but two owls reckoned in New-England’s Prospect; the second of which—“a great owl, almost as big as an eagle; his body being as good meat as a partridge” (l. c.)—is, perhaps, the snowy owl, which, according to Audubon, is good eating.—Peabody Report on Birds of Mass., p. 275.
[43] It is not clear what is meant here. The author merely mentions the bird again, in Voyages, p. 96.
[44] So Wood: “There are no magpies, jackdaws, cuckoos, jays, &c.”—New-England’s Prospect, l. c. Our author, in his Voyages, adds to the above list of New-England birds the following: “The partridge is larger than ours; white-flesht, but very dry: they are indeed a sort of partridges called grooses. The pidgeon, of which there are millions of millions.... The snow-bird, like a chaffinch, go in flocks, and are good meat.... Thrushes, with red breasts, which will be very fat, and are good meat.... Thressels, ... filladies, ... small singing-birds; ninmurders, little yellow birds; New-England nightingales, painted with orient colours,—black, white, blew, yellow, green, and scarlet,—and sing sweetly; wood-larks, wrens, swallows, who will sit upon trees; and starlings, black as ravens, with scarlet pinions. Other sorts of birds there are; as the troculus, wagtail or dish-water, which is here of a brown colour; titmouse,—two or three sorts; the dunneck or hedge-sparrow, who is starke naked in his winter nest; the golden or yellow hammer,—a bird about the bigness of a thrush, that is all over as red as bloud; woodpeckers of two or three sorts, gloriously set out with variety of glittering colours; the colibry, viemalin, or rising or walking-bird, an emblem of the resurrection, and the wonder of little birds. The water-fowl are these that follow: Hookers, or wild swans; cranes; ... four sorts of ducks,—a black duck, a brown duck like our wild ducks, a grey duck, and a great black and white duck. These frequent rivers and ponds. But, of ducks, there be many more sorts; as hounds, old wives, murres, doies, shell-drakes, shoulers or shoflers, widgeons, simps, teal, blew-wing’d and green-wing’d didapers or dipchicks, fenduck, duckers or moorhens, coots, pochards (a water-fowl like a duck), plungeons (a kind of water-fowl, with a long, reddish bill), puets, plovers, smethes, wilmotes (a kind of teal), godwits, humilities, knotes, red-shankes, ... gulls, white gulls or sea-cobbs, caudemandies, herons, grey bitterns, ox-eyes, birds called oxen and keen, petterels, king’s fishers, ... little birds that frequent the sea-shore in flocks, called sanderlins. They are about the bigness of a sparrow, and, in the fall of the leaf, will be all fat. When I was first in the countrie” (that is, in 1638; in which connection, what follows is not without its interest to us), “the English cut them into small pieces to put into their puddings, instead of suet. I have known twelve-score and above killed at two shots.... The cormorant, shape or sharke” (pp. 99-103).
[45] Compare the account given in the Voyages, pp. 82-95, which is much fuller; as also New-England’s Prospect, chap. vi.
[46] “Most fierce in strawberry-time; at which time they have young ones; at which time, likewise, they will go upright, like a man, and climb trees, and swim to the islands: which if the Indians see, there will be more sportful bear-baiting than Paris garden can afford; for, seeing the bears take water, an Indian will leap after him; where they go to water-cuffs for bloody noses and scratched sides. In the end, the man gets the victory; riding the bear over the watery plain, till he can bear him no longer.... There would be more of them, if it were not for the wolves which devour them. A kennel of those ravening runagadoes, setting upon a poor, single bear, will tear him as a dog will tear a kid.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c., which see farther; and also Josselyn’s Voyages, pp. 91-2.
[47] Stupefied with drink.—Webster, Eng. Dict.
[48] Thwart.
[49] “The woolves be in some respect different from them in other countries. It was never known yet that a wolf ever set upon a man or woman: neither do they trouble horses or cows; but swine, goats, and red calves, which they take for deer, be often destroyed by them; so that a red calf is cheaper than a black one, in that regard, in some places.... They be made much like a mungrel; being big-boned, lank-paunched, deep-breasted; having a thick neck and head, prick ears and long snout, with dangerous teeth; long, staring hair, and a great bush-tail. It is thought by many that our English mastiff might be too hard for them: but it is no such matter; for they care no more for an ordinary mastiff than an ordinary mastiff cares for a cur. Many good dogs have been spoiled by them.... There is little hope of their utter destruction; the country being so spacious, and they so numerous, travelling in the swamps by kennels: sometimes ten or twelve are of a company.... In a word, they be the greatest inconveniency the country hath.”—New-England’s Prospect, l. c.
[50] Spoken of again in the Voyages, pp. 94 and 193; and in Hubbard, Hist. N. England, p. 25. Josselyn’s may be compared with Lewis and Clark’s notice of the Indian dog (Travels, vol. ii. p. 165).
[51] Called also “lusern, or luceret,” in the Voyages, p. 85; the loup-cervier of Sagard (Hist. Can., 1636, cit. Aud. and Bachm. Vivip. Quad. N. A., p. 136); of Dobbs’s Hudson’s Bay, &c.; but more commonly called gray cat, or lynx, in New England. Wood calls it “more dangerous to be met withal than any other creature; not fearing either dog or man. He useth to kill deer.... He hath likewise a device to get geese: for, being much of the colour of a goose, he will place himself close by the water; holding up his bob-tail, which is like a goose-neck. The geese, seeing this counterfeit goose, approach nigh to visit him; who, with a sudden jerk, apprehends his mistrustless prey. The English kill many of these, accounting them very good meat.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. Audubon and Bachman (l. c., p. 14) give a similar good account of the flesh of the bay-lynx, or common wild-cat.
[52] The raccoon is, or has been, an inhabitant of all North America (Godman, Nat. Hist., vol. i. p. 117), and was one of the first of our animals with which European naturalists became acquainted. Linnæus (Syst. Nat.) cites Conrad Gesner among those who have illustrated or mentioned it. Wood says they are “as good meat as a lamb;” and further, that, “in the moonshine night, they go to feed on clams at a low tide, by the seaside, where the English hunt them with their dogs.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c.
[53] The author’s account of the Indian works in birch-bark and porcupine-quills is much fuller in his Voyages, p. 143.
[54] Wood’s account is far better.—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. vii. [See page 53] of the Rarities for mention of the musk quash.
[55] See Voyages, pp. 88-91. Called moos-soog (rendered “great-ox; or, rather, red deer”) in R. Williams’s Key (Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 223): but this is rather the plural form of moos; as see the same, l. c. p. 222, and note, and Rasles’ Dict. Abnaki, in loco. It is called mongsöa by the Cree Indians; and, it should seem, mongsoos by the Indians of the neighborhood of Carlton House; as see Richardson, in Sabine’s Appendix to Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey to the Polar Sea, pp. 665-6. “The English,” says Wood, “have some thoughts of keeping him tame, and to accustome him to the yoke; which will be a great commodity.... There be not many of these in the Massachusetts Bay; but, forty miles to the north-east, there be great store of them.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. On hunting the moose, as practised by the Indians, see Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 136.
[56] Wood (N. E. Prospect, l. c.) has but two kinds of deer: of which the first is the moose; and the second, called “ordinary deer,” and, in the vocabulary of Indian words, ottuck (compare attuck or noonatch, deer,—R. Williams, l. c.; but atteyk, in the Cree dialect, signifies a small sort of rein-deer,—Richardson, in Appendix to Franklin’s Journey, p. 665; and it is observable that Rasles’ word for chevreuil is norke), is our American fallow-deer. R. Williams also appears to distinguish with clearness but two; which are, perhaps, the same as Wood’s. Josselyn, in this book, passes quite over the common, or fallow-deer: but, making up in the Voyages for the fallings-short of the Rarities, he goes, in the former, quite the other way; reckoning the roe, buck, red deer, rein-deer, elk, maurouse, and maccarib. What is further said of these animals, where he speaks more at large, makes it appear likely that the second, third, and fourth names, so far as they have any value, belong to a single kind,—the “ordinary deer” of Wood (whose description possibly helped Josselyn’s), or our fallow-deer; to which the “roe” is also to be referred: and the “elk” he himself explains as the moose. But, beside these two kinds, Josselyn has the merit of indicating, with some distinctness, one, or possibly two, others,—the maurouse and the maccarib. The maurouse—of which only the Voyages make mention—“is somewhat like a moose; but his horns are but small, and himself about the size of a stag. These are the deer that the flat-footed wolves hunt after.”—Voyages, p. 91. This is to be compared with the mauroos, rendered “cerf,” of Rasles’ Dict., l. c., p. 382; and, in such connection, is hardly referable to other than the caribou, or rein-deer,—a well-known inhabitant of the north-eastern parts of New England, and likely, therefore, to have come to the knowledge of our author; while there seems to be no testimony to its ever having occurred in Massachusetts and southward, where Wood and Williams made their observations. The last, or the maccarib, caribo, or pohano, of Josselyn, is described above; and, in the Voyages (p. 91), he only repeats that it “is not found, that ever I heard yet, but upon Cape Sable, near to the French plantations.” The “round” hoofs of the maccarib might lead us to take this for the caribou of Maine; the round track of which differs much from that of the fallow-deer. But the former is more likely to have been the American elk; so rare, it should seem, where it occurred, when our author wrote, and so little known in the New-England settlements, that his fancy, fed by darkling hearsay, could deck it with the honors of the “unicorn.”
[57] “There are two or three kinds of them,—one a great yellow fox; another grey, who will climb up into trees. The black fox is of much esteem.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 82; where is also an account of the way of hunting foxes in New England. Wood has nothing special, but that some of the foxes “be black. Their furrs is of much esteem” (l. c.) Williams (l. c.) has “mishquashim, a red fox; pequawus, a gray fox. The Indians say they have black foxes, which they have often seen, but never could take any of them. They say they are manittooes.” Beside the common red fox, or mishquashim, we have in all these accounts—and also in Morell’s Nova Anglia, l. c., p. 129—mention of a black fox; which may have been the true black or silver fox, or, in part at least, the more common cross-fox (Aud. and Bachm., Viv. Quadr. N. A., p. 45); the pelt of which is also in high esteem. For Williams’s gray fox, see the next note. Josselyn’s climbing gray fox is perhaps the fisher (Mustela Canadensis, Schreb.), notwithstanding the color. According to Audubon (l. c., pp. 51, 310, 315), this is called the black fox in New England and the northern counties of New York. I have heard it more often called black cat in New Hampshire. But the true gray fox (Vulpes Virginianus) “has, to a certain degree, the power of climbing trees.” Newberry Zoology, Expl. for Pacific Railroad, vi, part 4, p. 40.
[58] “A creature much like a fox, but smaller.”—Voyages, p. 83. Probably the gray fox, called pequawus by R. Williams (Vulpes Virginianus, Schreb.); which has not the rank smell of the red fox.—Aud. and Bachm., l. c., p. 168.
[59] “They told me of a young lyon (not long before) kill’d at Piscataway by an Indian.”—Voyages, p. 23. Higginson says that lions “have been seen at Cape Anne.”—New-Eng. Plantation, l. c., p. 119. “Some affirm,” says Wood, “that they have seen a lion at Cape Anne.... Besides, Plimouth men” (that is, men of old Plymouth, it is likely) “have traded for lion-skins in former times. But sure it is that there be lions on that continent; for the Virginians saw an old lion in their plantation,” &c.—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. The animal here spoken of may well have been the puma or cougar, or American lion.
[60] “The rabbits be much like ours in England. The hares be some of them white, and a yard long. These two harmless creatures are glad to shelter themselves from the harmful foxes in hollow trees; having a hole at the entrance no bigger than they can creep in at.”—Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. Wood’s rabbit and Josselyn’s hare, so far as the summer coloring goes, appear to be the gray rabbit (Lepus sylvaticus, Aud. and Bachm., l. c. p. 173); and the white hare of Wood—as also, probably, the hare, “milk-white in winter,” of Josselyn—is doubtless the northern hare (Lepus Americanus, Erxl., Aud. and Bachm., l. c., p. 93).
[61] The Voyages mention, beside the quadrupeds above named, also the skunk (ségankoo of Rasles’ Dict., l. c.); the musquash (mooskooéssoo of Rasles, l. c.), for which [see also p. 53] of this; otter; marten, “as ours are in England, but blacker;” sable, “much of the size of a mattrise, perfect black, but ... I never saw but two of them in eight years’ space;” the squirrel, “three sorts,—the mouse-squirril, the gray squirril, and the flying-squirril (called by the Indian assapanick).” Our author’s mouse-squirrel, which he describes, is the ground or striped squirrel: probably the “anequus, a little coloured squirrel” of R. Williams, l. c.; and the anikoosess (rendered suisse) of Rasles, l. c. The mattrise of our author is, according to him, “a creature whose head and fore-parts is shaped somewhat like a lyon’s; not altogether so big as a house-cat. They are innumerable up in the countrey, and are esteemed good furr.”—Voyages, p. 87. The sable is compared with the mattrise, at least in size; and the name is perhaps comparable with mattegooéssoo of Rasles, l. c.; but this is rendered lièvre. Wood adds to this list of our quadrupeds, mistakenly, the ferret; and R. Williams, the “ockquutchaunnug,—a wild beast of a reddish hair, about the bigness of a pig, and rooting like a pig;” which seems to answer, in name as well as habits, to our woodchuck, or ground-hog.
[62] The author’s attempt here at a general catalogue of the fishes, mollusks, &c., of the North-Atlantic Ocean, affords but a poor make-shift for such a list as we might fairly have expected from him of the species known to the early fishermen in the waters and seas of New England; and the account in his Voyages (pp. 104-15) is again an improvement on the present, and is confined to the inhabitants of our waters. The present editor has little to offer in elucidation of the list; which indeed, in good part, appears sufficiently intelligible. Compare Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, chap. x.
[63] “Like a herrin, but has a bigger bellie; therefore called an alewife.”—Voyages, p. 107. The other names, alize and allow, are doubtless corruptions of the French alose, also in use among London fishmongers to designate shad from certain waters.—Rees’s Cyc., in loco. The old Latin word alosa, supposed to have been always applied to the fish just mentioned, is adopted by Cuvier for the genus which includes our shad, alewife, and menhaden.
[64] The tunny is so called on the coast of New England.—Storer’s Report on the Fishes of Mass., p. 48.
[65] It is, notwithstanding, set down in the author’s list of fishes “that are to be seen and catch’d in the sea and fresh waters in New England.”—Voyages, p. 113. And compare Storer, Synops. (Mem. Am. Acad., N. S., vol. ii.), p. 300.
[66] See Voyages, p. 108. The first settlers esteemed the bass above most other fish. See Higginson’s New-England’s Plantation (Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 120). Wood calls it (New-Eng. Prospect, chap. ix.) “one of the best fish in the country; and though men are soon wearied with other fish, yet are they never with bass. The Indians,” he says, eat lobsters, “when they can get no bass.” The head was especially prized; as see Wood, and also Roger Williams’s Key (Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 224). The fish is our striped bass (Labrax lineatus, Cuv.; Storer’s Report on Fishes of Mass., p. 7). Our author, at [p. 37], again mentions it as one of the eight fishes which “the Indians have in greatest request.”
[67] [See p. 96] as to the blue-fish, or horse-mackerel; and Storer, l. c., p. 57.
[68] The bonito of our fishermen is the skipjack.—Storer, l. c., p. 49.
[70] [See p. 96]. Josselyn’s character of the fish as food is confirmed by Dr. Storer, l. c., p. 69.
[71] The clam is one of the eight fishes mentioned at p. 37 as most prized by the Indians. “Sickishuog (clams). This is a sweet kind of shell-fish, which all Indians generally over the country, winter and summer, delight in; and, at low water, the women dig for them. This fish, and the natural liquor of it, they boil; and it makes their broth and their nasaump (which is a kind of thickened broth) and their bread seasonable and savoury, instead of salt.”—Williams’s Key, &c., l. c. p. 224. “These fishes be in great plenty in most parts of the country: which is a great commodity for the feeding of swine, both in winter and summer; for, being once used to those places, they will repair to them as duly, every ebb, as if they were driven to them by keepers.”—Wood, N. Eng. Prospect, l. c. The mollusk thus approved is the common clam (Mya arenaria, L.); but the poquauhock, or quahog (Venus mercenaria, L.), “which the Indians wade deep and dive for” (R. Williams, l. c., p. 224), was also eaten by them, and the black part of the shell used for making their suckauhock, or black money. Wood speaks also of “clams as big as a penny white loaf, which are great dainties amongst the natives” (N. E. Prospect, l. c.); doubtless the giant clam (Mactra solidissima, Chemn.) of Gould (Report on Invertebr. of Mass., p. 51), which is still esteemed as food.
[72] [See p. 36]; by which it appears that the author has in view the meteauhock of the Indians; “the periwinkle, of which they make their wompam, or white money, of half the value of their suckauhock, or black money” (R. Williams, l. c.): supposed to be Buccinum undatum, L. (Gould, l. c., p. 305); and possibly, also, one or two other allied shell-fish.
[73] “Cod-fish in these seas” (that is, Massachusetts Bay) “are larger than in Newfoundland,—six or seven making a quintal; whereas they have fifteen to the same weight.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. Compare Storer, l. c., p. 121. Josselyn has an entertaining account of the sea-fishery, in his Voyages, pp. 210-13.
[74] See further of eels, and the author’s several ways of cooking them, in his Voyages, p. 111. At [p. 37] of the Rarities, eels are mentioned among the fishes most prized by the Indians. “These eels be not of so luscious a taste as they be in England, neither are they so aguish; but are both wholesome for the body, and delightful for the taste.”—Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, chap. ix.
[75] [See p. 37], where it is said to be one of the fishes which “the Indians have in greatest request.”—“Poponaumsuog” of R. Williams, l. c., p. 225. He says, “Some call them frost-fish, from their coming up from the sea into fresh brooks in times of frost and snow.”
[76] “Grampoise; Fr. grandpoisson;” corrupted grampus.—Webster, Dict.
[77] “These hollibut be little set by while bass is in season.”—Wood, l. c., chap. ix.
[78] “The sea-hare is as big as grampus, or herrin-hog; and as white as a sheet. There hath been of them in Black-Point Harbour, and some way up the river; but we could never take any of them. Several have shot sluggs at them, but lost their labour.”—Voyages, p. 105. The Lepus marinus of the old writers is a naked mollusk of the Mediterranean; Laplysia depilans, L.: but Josselyn’s was a very different animal.
[79] One of the fishes most valued by the Indians [(p. 37)]; but “not much set by” by the English, according to Wood, l. c.
[80] “I have seene some myselfe that have weighed 16 pound; but others have had, divers times, so great lobsters as have weighed 25 pound, as they assure me.”—Higginson’s New-Eng. Plantation, l. c., p. 120; with which compare Gould’s Report, &c., p. 360. “Their plenty makes them little esteemed, and seldom eaten.”—Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, chap. ix. At p. 37, Josselyn counts them among the fishes, &c., most esteemed by the Indians; but Wood (l. c.) qualifies this in a passage already cited. The Indians, it seems, sometimes dried them, “as they do lampres and oysters; which are delicate breakfast-meat so ordered.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 110. See the Indian way of catching lobsters, in Voyages, p. 140.
[81] “Munk-fish, a flat-fish like scate; having a hood like a fryer’s cowl” [(p. 96)]. Lophius Americanus, Cuv., the sea-devil of Storer (Synops. of Amer. Fishes, in Mem. Amer. Acad., N. S., vol. ii. p. 381), is called monk-fish in Maine.—Williamson, Hist., vol. i. p. 157.
[83] “The muscle is of two sorts,—sea-muscles (in which they find pearl) and river-muscles.”—Voyages, p. 110. [See p. 37], of the present volume, for an account of “the scarlet muscle,” which ... “yieldeth a perfect purple or scarlet juice; dyeing linnen so that no washing will wear it out,” &c. This could scarcely have been a Purpura or Buccinum.
[84] See Voyages, p. 110. “The oysters be great ones,” says Wood; “in form of a shoe-horn: some be a foot long. These breed on certain banks that are bare every spring-tide.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. ix. This was in the waters of Massachusetts Bay, where Higginson (New-Eng. Plantation, l. c., p. 120) also speaks of their being found. The question whether the oyster is an indigenous inhabitant of our bay, or only an introduced stranger, is considered by Dr. Gould (Report on Invert. Animals of Mass., pp. 135, 365).
[85] One of the fishes “in greatest request” among the Indians (p. 37). Wood says it “is as good as it is in England, and in great plenty in some places.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. ix.
[86] “The shads be bigger than the English shads, and fatter.”—Wood, l. c.
[87] “Taut-auog (sheep’s-heads).” So Roger Williams’s Key, l. c., p. 224. It is probable, therefore, that our author had the fish that we call tautog in his mind here. What is now called sheep’s-head is not known in Massachusetts Bay and northward.—Storer, l. c., p. 36.
[88] [See p. 34]; and Wood, l. c., chap. ix.
[89] [See p. 96]. It appears to be the mollusk, the shell of which is well known as the razor-shell (Solen ensis, L.).—Gould, Report, p. 28.
[90] [See p. 32]. “The sturgeons be all over the country; but the best catching of them is upon the shoals of Cape Cod and in the river of Merrimack, where much is taken, pickled, and brought to England. Some of these be 12, 14, and 18 feet long.”—Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, chap. ix. R. Williams says that “the natives, for the goodness and greatness of it, much prize it; and will neither furnish the English with so many, nor so cheap, that any great trade is like to be made of it, until the English themselves are fit to follow the fishing.”—Key, l. c., p. 224. It is one of Josselyn’s eight fish which are in “greatest request” with the Indians (p. 37). He calls “Pechipscut” River, in Maine, “famous for multitudes of mighty large sturgeon.”—Voyages, p. 204.
[91] See Voyages, pp. 105-6.
[92] “This fish is much used for bait to catch a cod, hacke, polluck, and the like sea-fish.”—Voyages, p. 107. It is still so used.
[93] Described at p. 95.
[94] [See p. 34] of this, and p. 109 of the Voyages, where the author says, “Of sea-turtles, there are five sorts; of land-turtles, three sorts,—one of which is a right land-turtle, that seldom or never goes into the water; the other two being the river-turtle and the pond-turtle.”—See also the author’s observations on sea-turtles, at p. 39 of the Voyages.
[95] “Trouts there be good store in every brook; ordinarily two and twenty inches long. Their grease is good for the piles and clifts.”—Voyages, p. 110.
[96] See Storer’s Report, p. 146.
[97] [See p. 35]; and Voyages, p. 104. “The natives cut them in several parcel, and give and send them far and near for an acceptable present or dish.”—R. Williams, Key, l. c., p. 224.
[98] See Voyages, p. 110. This is the common sea-egg; Echinus granulatus, Say.—Gould’s Rep., p. 344.
[99] [See p. 24] and note.
[100] Our author’s account of the fishes of New England may take this of old Wood (N. E. Prospect, l. c.) for a tail-piece. “The chief fish for trade,” says he, “is a cod; but, for the use of the country, there is all manner of fish, as followeth:—
“The king of waters,—the sea-shouldering Whale;
The snuffing Grampus, with the oily seal;
The storm-presaging Porpus, Herring-hog;
Line-shearing Shark, the Cat-fish, and Sea-dog;
The scale-fenced Sturgeon; wry-mouthed Hollibut;
The flouncing Salmon, Codfish, Greedigut;
Cole, Haddick, Hake, the Thornback, and the Scate,
(Whose slimy outside makes him seld’ in date;)
The stately Bass, old Neptune’s fleeting post,
That tides it out and in from sea to coast;
Consorting Herrings, and the bony Shad;
Big-bellied Alewives; Mackrels richly clad
With rainbow-colour, the Frost-fish and the Smelt,
As good as ever Lady Gustus felt;
The spotted Lamprons; Eels; the Lamperies,
That seek fresh-water brooks with Argus-eyes:
These watery villagers, with thousands more,
Do pass and repass near the verdant shore.”
[102] The account in the Voyages (pp. 114-23) is better; and Wood’s, in New-England’s Prospect, chap. xi. (to which last, Josselyn was possibly indebted), far better.
[103] See “the generating of these creatures,” in Voyages, p. 119. “Here, likewise,” says Wood, “be great store of frogs, which, in the spring, do chirp and whistle like a bird; and, at the latter end of summer, croak like our English frogs.”—N. Eng. Prospect, l. c. In his Voyages, Josselyn speaks (as Wood had done) of the tree-toad, and also of another kind of toad; and of “the eft, or swift, ... a most beautiful creature to look upon; being larger than ours, and painted with glorious colours: but I lik’d him never the better for it” (p. 119).
[104] Wood’s account (New-Eng. Prospect, l. c.) is worth comparing with Higginson’s (New-England’s Plantation, l. c.) and with Josselyn’s, both here and at pp. 23 and 114 of the Voyages. Wood justly says of this “most poisonous and dangerous creature,” that it is “nothing so bad as the report goes of him.... He is naturally,” he continues, “the most sleepy and unnimble creature that lives; never offering to leap or bite any man, if he be not trodden on first: and it is their desire, in hot weather, to lie in paths where the sun may shine on them; where they will sleep so soundly, that I have known four men to stride over them, and never awake her.... Five or six men,” he adds, “have been bitten by them; which, by using of snake-weed” (compare the preface to this, p. 119), “were all cured; never any yet losing his life by them. Cows have been bitten; but, being cut in divers places, and this weed thrust into their flesh, were cured. I never heard of any beast that was yet lost by any of them, saving one mare” (l. c.). Of other serpents, Wood mentions the black snake; and Josselyn, in his Voyages (l. c.), speaks of “infinite numbers, of various colours;” and especially of “one sort that exceeds all the rest; and that is the checkquered snake, having as many colours within the checkquers shadowing one another as there are in a rainbow.” He says again, “The water-snake will be as big about the belly as the calf of a man’s leg” which is, perhaps, the water-adder. Josselyn adds, “I never heard of any mischief that snakes did” (l. c.); and so Wood: “Neither doth any other kind of snakes” (the rattle-snake always excepted, as no doubt dangerous when trodden on) “molest either man or beast.” There are perhaps no worse prejudices in common life, than those which breed cruelty. In the Voyages (p. 23), our author makes mention “of a sea-serpent, or snake, that lay quoiled up like a cable upon a rock at Cape Ann. A boat passing by with English aboard, and two Indians, they would have shot the serpent: but the Indians disswaded them; saying, that, if he were not kill’d outright, they would be all in danger of their lives.” This was from “some neighbouring gentlemen in our house, who came to welcome me into the countrey;” and it seems, that, “amongst variety of discourse, they told me also of a young lyon (not long before) killed at Piscataway by an Indian;” which, indeed, was possibly not without foundation. And as to the serpent, compare a Report of a Committee of the Linnæan Society of New England relative to a large marine animal, supposed to be a serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Mass., in August, 1817 (Boston, 1817); which contains also a full account of a smaller animal—supposed not to differ, even in species, from the large—which was taken on the rocks of Cape Ann.—See also Storer, Report on the Reptiles of Mass.; Supplement, p. 410.
[105] The author continues his entomological observations, in his Voyages, p. 115; and the account is fuller than Wood’s; New-England’s Prospect, chap. xi.
[106] Gerard by Johnson, p. 17,—Carex flava, L.; the first species of this genus indicated in North America, and common also to Europe. There is no doubt of the reference, taking Josselyn’s name to be meant for specific, and to refer to Gerard’s first figure with the same name. But it is certainly possible that our author had in view only a general reference to Gerard’s fourteenth chapter, “Of Hedgehog Grasse,” which brings together plants of very different genera; and, in this case, his name is of little account. Cutler (Account of Indig. Veg., l. c., 1785) mentions three genera of Cyperaceæ, but not Carex; nor did he ever publish that description of our true Gramineæ “and other native grasses,” which, he says (l. c., p. 407), “may be the subject of another paper.” The first edition of Bigelow’s Florula Bostoniensis (1814) has seven species of Carex, which are increased to seventeen in the second edition (1824); the list embracing the most common and conspicuous forms. The genus has since been made an object of special study, and the number of our species, in consequence, greatly increased. A list of Carices of the neighborhood of Boston, published by the present writer in 1841 (Hovey’s Mag. Hort.), gives forty-seven species; and Professor Dewey’s Report on the Herbaceous Plants of Massachusetts, in 1840, reckons ninety-one species within the limits of his work.
[107] Johnson’s Gerard, p. 42,—English matweed, or helme (the other species being excluded, as not English, by our author’s caption); which I take to be Calamagrostis arenaria (L.) Roth, of Gray, Man., p. 548; called sea-matweed in England, and common to Europe and America. But if the author only intended to refer to Gerard’s “Chapter 34, of Mat-weed,”—which is perhaps, on the whole, unlikely,—his name is of no value.
[108] Gerard, p. 46,—Typha latifolia, L.,—common to America and Europe.
[109] Gerard, p. 47,—Stellaria graminea, L.; for which our author mistook, as did Cutler a century after, the nearly akin S. longifolia, Muhl.
[110] Appears not to be meant for a specific reference to any of Gerard’s species; but only an indication of the genus, with the single distinguishing character of color, which was enough to separate the New-England plants from the only British one referred by Gerard to Iris. Both of our blue-flags are peculiar to the country.
[111] Not one of Gerard’s bastard daffodils, but his dog’s-tooth, p. 204 (Erythronium, L.). Our common dog’s-tooth was at first taken for a variety of the European, but is now reckoned distinct.
[112] Gerard, p. 205,—Orchis, L., etc. It is here clear that the name is used only in a general way. The second name (Satyrion), perhaps, however, makes our author’s notion a little more definite, and permits us to refer the plants he had probably in view to species of Platanthera, Rich. (Gray, Man., p. 444), of which only one is certainly known to be common to us and Europe.
[113] Gerard, em. p. 257,—Nasturtium officinale, L. Reckoned also by Cutler, and indeed naturalized in some parts of the country (Gray, Man., p. 30); but our author had probably N. palustre, DC. (marsh-cress), if any thing of this genus, and not rather Cardamine hirsuta, L. (hairy lady’s smock), in his mind. Both the last are common to us and Europe.—Gray, l. c.
[114] Gerard, p. 192. Lilium bulbiferum (the garden red lily) is meant; for which our author mistook our own red lily (L. Philadelphicum, L.).
[115] Of the two plants,—either of which may possibly have been in view of the author here,—the sorrell du bois, or white wood-sorrel of Gerard, p. 1101 (Oxalis acetosella, L.) which is truly common to Europe and America, and the sheep’s sorrel (Gerard, p. 397,—Rumex acetosella, L.), which inhabits, indeed, the whole northern hemisphere, but is taken by Dr. Gray to be a naturalized weed here, I incline to think the latter less likely to have escaped Josselyn’s attention than the former, and to be what he means to say appeared to him as native, in 1671. For the yellow wood-sorrel, [see farther on].
[116] Gerard, em., p. 404,—Ophioglossum vulgatum, L.; common to us and Europe.
[117] Gerard, em., p. 409,—Smilacina bifolia (L.), Ker; common to us and Europe.
[118] Gerard, em., p. 410. A mistake of our author’s, which can hardly be set right. The station is against the plant’s having been Smilacina trifolia (L.), Desf. But it may be that Clintonia borealis (Ait.) Raf., was intended.
[119] Alisma plantago, L., common to Europe and America; “called, in New England, water suck-leaves and scurvie-leaves. You must lay them whole to the leggs to draw out water between the skin and the flesh.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 80. As to its medicinal properties, see Gerard, p. 419; and Wood and Bache, Dispens., p. 1293.
[120] Plantago maritima, L. (Gerard, p. 423), a native of Europe and America, is our only sea-plantain. One of the others was probably Triglochin.
[121] Sagittaria sagittifolia, L. (now called arrowhead), common to Europe and America; though here passing into some varieties which are unknown in the European Floras.
[122] Gentiana saponaria, L., peculiar to America, but nearly akin to the European G. pneumonanthe, L., which our author intended.—Johnson’s Gerard, edit. cit., p. 438.
[123] The plant is green hellebore (Veratrum viride, Ait.); so near, indeed, to the white hellebore (V. album, L.) of Europe, that it was taken for it by Michaux. In his Voyages, the author, after speaking of the use of opium by the Turks, says, “The English in New England take white hellebore, which operates as fairly with them as with the Indians,” &c. (p. 60); and see p. 76, further.
[124] Polygonum lapathifolium, L. (Hydropiper of Gerard, p. 445),—for which, perhaps, P. hydropiper, L., was mistaken,—and P. Persicaria, L. (Persicaria maculosa of Gerard, l. c.), are what the author means; being the two sorts figured by Gerard himself. The third, added by Johnson, is unknown in this country; and the fourth belongs to a very different genus. P. Persicaria is marked as introduced in the late Mr. Oakes’s catalogue of the plants of Vermont; and both this and P. hydropiper are considered to be naturalized weeds by Dr. Gray (Man., p. 373). Josselyn’s testimony as to the former, as appearing to him to be native in 1671, is therefore not without interest; and possibly it is not quite worthless as to the latter.
[125] Chamæsyce, or spurge-time, of Gerard (edit. cit., p. 504), is Euphorbia chamæsyce, L., a species belonging to the Eastern continent; for which Sloane (cit. L. Sp. Pl. in loco) appears to have mistaken our Euphorbia maculata, L.; while Plukenet (Alm. 372, cit. L.) recognizes the affinity of the same plants, calling the latter Chamæsyce altera Virginiana. Josselyn’s spurge-time may be E. maculata; but quite possibly, taking the station which he gives into the account, E. polygonifolia, L.
[126] There are “several sorts of spurge,” according to the Voyages (p. 78); of which this, which I cannot specifically refer, is possibly one.
[127] To this species of Saxifraga, L., unknown to our Flora (Gerard, p. 528), our author, with little doubt, referred the pretty S. Virginiensis, Michx.—See p. 58 of this, note.
[128] Gerard, em., p. 535,—Salicornia herbacea, L. But Linnæus referred one of Clayton’s Virginia specimens (the rest he did not distinguish from S. herbacea) to a variety, β. Virginica (which he took to be also European; Sp. Pl.), and afterwards raised this to a species, as S. Virginica, Syst. Nat., vol. ii. p. 52, Willd. Sp. Pl., vol. i. p. 25. To this the more common glasswort of our salt marshes is to be referred; and we possess, beside, a still better representative of the European plant in S. mucronata, Bigel. (Fl. Bost., edit. 2, p. 2), which may perhaps best be taken for a peculiar variety (S. herbacea, β. mucronata, articulorum dentibus squamisque mucronatis, Enum. Pl. Cantab., Ms.; and S. Virginica may well be another) of a species common to us and Europe. It is certain that we have plants strictly common to American and European Floras, in which the differences referable to difference of atmospheric and other like conditions are either not apparent or of no account; and it is possible that there are yet other species, now considered peculiar to America, which only differ from older European species in those characters—whether of exuberance mostly, or also of impoverishment—in which an American variety of a plant, common to America and Europe, might beforehand be expected to differ from an European state of the same. “Linnæus ut Tournefortii errores corrigeret, varietates nimis contraxit.”—Link, Phil. Bot., p. 222.
[129] Hypericum perforatum, L. (“Hypericum, S. John’s-wort; in shops, Perforata.”—Gerard, edit. cit., p. 539). The species is considered to have been introduced, by most American authors; and it is possible that Josselyn had H. corymbosum, Muhl., in his mind.
[130] Hypericum quadrangulum, L. (Gerard, p. 542); for which our author doubtless mistook H. mutilum, L. (H. parviflorum, Willd.), a species peculiar to America; to which Cutler’s H. quadrangulum (Account of Indig. Veg., l. c., p. 474) is probably also to be referred.
[131] Veronica arvensis, L. (Gerard, p. 613),—a native, at present, of Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, and North America (Benth., in DC. Prodr., vol. x. p. 482); but considered to have been introduced here.
[132] Veronica, L. The species is perhaps V. officinalis, L.; which, together with V. serpyllifolia, L., is considered by Prof. Gray to be both indigenous and introduced here.—Man. Bot., pp. 200-1.
[133] Hedeoma pulegioides (L.) Pers. (American pennyroyal), is doubtless meant. The specific name indicates its resemblance—in smell and taste particularly—to Mentha pulegium, L.; for which our author and Cutler (l. c., p. 461) mistook it. But the former is peculiar to America.
[134] Mentha aquatica, L. Sp. Pl. (Gerard, p. 684); for which it is likely our author (and also Cutler, l. c., p. 460) mistook M. Canadensis, L., Gray.
[135] Nepeta cataria, L. (Gerard, em., p. 682); considered by American botanists to have been introduced from Europe.
[136] Agrimonia Eupatoria, L. (Gerard, em., p. 712); common to America and Europe.
[137] Xanthium strumarium, L., Gray (Gerard, p. 809); common, as a species, to both continents; but in part, also, introduced.—Gray, Man., p. 212.
[138] Nuphar advena, Ait.,—the common American species,—is meant; and this, though resembling N. lutea, Sm., of Europe, is distinct from it.
[139] Arum, L. (Gerard, p. 381). The New-England species “differ,” as our author says, “from all the kinds” in the Old World.
[140] None of the species, presumably here meant, are common to America and Europe. Our author’s white violet is Viola blanda, Willd.
[141] All our true honeysuckles (“woodbinde, or honisuckles,”—Gerard, p. 891; Caprifolium, Juss.) are distinct from those of Europe; but what the author meant here is uncertain.
[142] Convallaria, L.; Polygonatum, Tourn.; Smilacina, Desf. Many botanists have referred our smaller Solomon’s seal to the nearly akin C. multiflora of Europe; but Dr. Gray (Manual, p. 466) pronounces the former a distinct American species. The second of Josselyn’s species is the “Polygonatum Virginianum, or Virginian’s Salomon’s seale” of Johnson’s Gerard (p. 905), and also of Morison (Hist., cit. L.), and earliest described and figured by Cornuti as P. Canadense, &c., which is Smilacina stellata, (L.) Desf.; peculiar to America. The third is set down by our author, at p. 56, among the “plants proper to the country;” and Wood (New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v.) mentions it among eatable wild fruits, by the same name. It is probably Smilacina racemosa, (L.) Desf.,—a suggestion which I owe to my friend Rev. J. L. Russell’s notes upon Josselyn’s plants, in Hovey’s Magazine (March, April, and May, 1858); papers which were published after the manuscript of this edition had passed from the hands of the editor,—and is also confined to this continent.
[143] Geranium, L. The first is G. Carolinianum, L., which nearly resembles Gerard’s dove’s-foot (p. 938); the second is G. Robertianum, L., common to us and Europe; and the third (Gerard, p. 940)—which cannot be G. dissectum—was meant, it is likely to be taken for synonymous with the fourth, or raven’s-claw,—doubtless our lovely G. maculatum, L., which belongs to that group of species which the old botanists distinguished by the common name Geranium batrachioides, or crow-foot geranium, which flowers in May, and is of well-known value in medicine; and the “knobby” root, attributed to Josselyn’s third kind, favors this opinion.
[144] The genus Potentilla, L., in general, is perhaps intended by cinque-foil; and although our author probably confounded the common and variable Potentilla Canadensis, L., with the nearly akin P. reptans and P. verna, L., of Europe, yet the larger part of our New-England species are, with little doubt, common to both continents. What Josselyn referred to Tormentilla, L.,—a genus not now separated from Potentilla,—was probably a state of P. Canadensis, which resembles P. reptans, L., as remarked above (and was, indeed, mistaken for it by Cutler,—l. c., p. 453), as this does Tormentilla reptans, L.
[145] Geum strictum, Ait.,—not found in England, but European (Gray, Man., p. 116),—is indicated by the author’s phrase; and see the Voyages, p. 78, for his opinion of its medicinal virtue.
[146] Fragaria vesca, L. (the common wood-strawberry of Europe), is native here, according to Oakes (Catal. Verm., p. 12), “especially on mountains;” and I have even gathered it, but possibly naturalized, on the woody banks of Fresh Pond in Cambridge. Our more common strawberry was not separated from the European by Linnæus, but is now reckoned a distinct species. “There is likewise strawberries in abundance,” says Wood (New-England’s Prospect, l. c.),—“very large ones; some being two inches about. One may gather half a bushel in a forenoon.”—“This berry,” says Roger Williams (Key, in Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 221), “is the wonder of all the fruits growing naturally in those parts. It is of itself excellent; so that one of the chiefest doctors of England was wont to say, that God could have made, but God never did make, a better berry. In some parts, where the natives have planted, I have many times seen as many as would fill a good ship, within few miles’ compass. The Indians bruise them in a mortar, and mix them with meal, and make strawberry-bread.” Gookin also speaks of Indian-bread.—Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 150.
[147] The two plants here intended, and supposed by the author to correspond with the “wild angelica” and “great wilde angelica” of Gerard (pp. 999-1000), may perhaps be taken for the same which Cornuti (Canad. Pl. Hist., pp. 196-200), thirty years before, had designated as new,—Josselyn’s Angelica sylvestris minor being Angelica lucida Canadensis of Cornuti, which is A. lucida, L. (and probably, as the French botanist describes the fruit as “minus foliacea vulgaribus,” also Archangelica peregrina, Nutt.); and his Angelica sylvestris major being A. atropurpurea Canadensis of Cornuti, or A. atropurpurea, L.
[148] Smyrnium aureum, L. (golden Alexanders), now separated from that genus, was mistaken, it is quite likely, for S. olusatrum, L. (true Alexanders), to which it bears a considerable resemblance.—Gerard, p. 1019.
[149] Achillea millefolium, L. Oakes has marked this as introduced (Catal. Vermont, p. 17): but it appeared to our author, in 1672, to be indigenous; and Dr. Gray reckons it among plants common to both hemispheres.—Statistics of Amer. Flora, in Am. Jour. Sci., vol. xxiii. p. 70. The author’s reference is to common yarrow.—Gerard, p. 1072.
[150] Aquilegia Canadensis, L. As elsewhere, the author probably means here only that the genus is common to both continents.
[151] At p. 56, both of these are set down among the “plants proper to the country.” The first, to follow Gerard (p. 1108), is Chenopodium botrys, L.,—a native of the south of Europe, and considered as an introduced species here. It has reputation in diseases of the chest.—Wood & Bache, Dispens., p. 213. Josselyn’s oak of Cappadocia (Gerard, p. 1108) is an American species,—Ambrosia elatior, L. Cutler says of it (l. c., p. 489), “It has somewhat the smell of camphire. It is used in antiseptick fomentations.”
[152] Galium aparine, L. (Gerard, edit. cit., p. 1122), common to America and Europe.—Compare Gray, Man., p. 170.
[153] The “Filix mas, or male ferne,” of Gerard, edit. cit., p. 1128 (for, says he, of the “divers sorts of ferne ... there be two sorts, according to the old writers,—the male and the female; and these be properly called ferne: the others have their proper names”), is the collective designation of four species of Aspidium; of which all, according to Pursh, and certainly three, are natives of both continents,—AA. cristatum, Filix mas, Filix fæmina, and aculeatum, Willd. “Filix fæmina (female ferne, or brakes,)” of Gerard, l. c. is Pteris aquilina, L.; also common to us and Europe. The other Filices mentioned by our author are Ophioglossum vulgatum, L. (p. 42); and Adiantum pedatum, L. (p. 55).
[154] Oxalis corniculata, L. (Gerard, em., p. 1202), common to Europe and America.
[155] Ulmus, L. There are no species common to America and Europe.
[156] See the Voyages, p. 69, where the author has it “the line-tree, with long nuts: the other kind I could never find.” The former was Tilia Americana, L.,—a species peculiar to America.
[157] [See p. 48]; and Voyages, p. 69. None of our species are found in Europe.
[158] The plant intended is doubtless the same with that spoken of in the Voyages, p. 80.—“Rosa solis, sundew, moor-grass. This plant I have seen more of than ever I saw in my whole life before in England,” &c. Both our common New-England species of Drosera are also natives of Europe.
[159] “Differing much from those in England. One sort of them bears a most beautiful flower” (p. 56, where it is rightly placed among plants “proper to the country”). The author refers here, doubtless, to Apios tuberosa, Moench. (ground-nut of New England), which was raised at Paris, from American seeds, by Vespasian Robin, and figured from his specimens by Cornuti (Canad., p. 200) in 1635; but it was celebrated, ten years earlier, in “Nova Anglia,”—a curious poem by the Rev. William Morrell, who came over with Capt. Robert Gorges in 1623, and spent about a year at Weymouth and Plymouth, publishing his book in 1625 (repr. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 125, &c.),—as follows:—
“Vimine gramineo nux subterranea suavis
Serpit humi, tenui flavo sub cortice, pingui
Et placido nucleo nivei candoris ab intra,
Melliflua parcos hilarans dulcedine gustus,
Donec in æstivum Phœbus conscenderit axem.
His nucleis laute versutus vescitur Indus:
His exempta fames segnis nostratibus omnis
Dulcibus his vires revocantur victibus almæ.”
[160] [See p. 52] and Voyages (pp. 70, 81) for other notices of Fungi; and Voyages, p. 81, for the only mention of Algæ.
[161] Female pimpernell (Gerard, em., p. 617),—Anagallis arvensis, γ, Sm.; A. cærulea, Schreb.,—but scarcely differing, except in color, from the scarlet pimpernel, which has long (“in clayey ground,”—Cutler, l. c., 1785) been an inhabitant of the coasts of Massachusetts Bay, though doubtless introduced.
[162] Hepatica triloba, Chaix. (Anemone hepatica, L.), common to Europe and America; occurring occasionally with white flowers.—Gerard, em., p. 1203.
[163] Rubus, L. The red raspberry of this country is hardly other than an American variety of the European (R. Idæus, var. strigosus, caule petiolis pedunculis calyceque aculeato-hispidissimis, Enum. Pl. Agri Cantab, 1843, Ms.); upon which see Gray (Man., p. 121; and Statistics, &c., l. c., p. 81). R. triflorus, Richards., is also very near to, and was once considered the same as, the European R. saxatilis, L. The rest of our New-England raspberries and blackberries appear to be specifically distinct from those of Europe. The cloud-berry, mentioned at p. 60, is there set down among plants proper to the country; and may therefore not be the true cloud-berry (Gerard, p. 1273), or Rubus chamæmorus, L., which is common to both continents.
[164] The New-England gooseberries are peculiar to this country. The author no doubt intends Ribes hirtellum, Michx. (Gray, Man., p. 137); as see further his Voyages, p. 72.
[165] Cratægus, L. But the species are peculiar to this country, as Josselyn implies with respect to the haws which he notices. These, no doubt, included C. tomentosa, L., Gray; and perhaps, also, C. coccinea, L. Wood says, “The white thorn affords hawes as big as an English cherry; which is esteemed above a cherry for his goodness and pleasantness to the taste.”—New-England’s Prospect, chap. v. At page 72 of his Voyages, the author mentions “a small shrub, which is very common; growing sometimes to the height of elder; bearing a berry like in shape to the fruit of the white thorn; of a pale, yellow colour at first, then red (when it is ripe, of a deep purple); of a delicate, aromatical tast, but somewhat stiptick,”—which may be Pyrus arbutifolia, L. Higginson (New-England’s Plantation, l. c., p. 119) speaks of our haws almost as highly as Wood.
[166] Great toad-flax (Gerard, em., p. 550); Linaria vulgaris, Moench. Compare De Candolle (Geog. Bot., vol. ii. p. 716) for a sketch of the American history of this now familiar plant, which the learned author cannot trace before Bigelow’s date (Fl. Bost., edit. 1) of 1814. But it is certainly Cutler’s “snapdragon; ... blossoms yellow, with a mixture of scarlet; common by roadsides in Lynn and Cambridge” (l. c., 1785): though he strangely prefixes the Linnæan phrase for Antirrhinum Canadense, L.; and there seems no reason to doubt that Josselyn may very well have seen it in 1671.
[167] Gerard, p. 653 (Teucrium, L.). The author may have intended to reckon the genus only. Our species is peculiar to this continent.
[168] The designation is uncertain. The old botanists gave the name Auricula muris, or mouse-ear, to species of Myosotis, Draba, Hieracium, and Gnaphalium. Josselyn’s plant may most probably be Antennaria plantaginifolia, Hook. (mouse-ear of New England), which is very near to A. dioica of Europe.—Gray, Statistics, &c., l. c., p. 81.
[169] Quercus alba, L.; Q. rubra, L.; and Q. tinctoria, Bartr. Wood’s account of the oaks (New-England’s Prospect, chap. v.) is similar. In his Voyages, p. 61, Josselyn gives us “the ordering of red oake for wainscot. When they have cut it down and clear’d it from the branches, they pitch the body of the tree in a muddy place in a river, with the head downward, for some time. Afterwards they draw it out; and, when it is seasoned sufficiently, they saw it into boards for wainscot; and it will branch out into curious works.”
[170] Juniperus communis, L.; common to both continents. But the author did not probably distinguish from it J. Virginiana, L.; which is frequent, and often dwarfish, near the sea.
[171] Salix, L.; the genus only meant here, it is likely.
[172] Daphne Laureola, L. (Gerard, p. 1404), with which Josselyn may have considered Kalmia angustifolia, L., in some sort allied. The latter has long been known in New England as dwarf or low laurel.
[173] Myrica Gale, L. (Gerard, p. 1414); common to Europe and America.
[174] Sambucus, L. Our S. Canadensis, L. differs very little from the common elder of Europe, except, as our author in his Voyages says (p. 71), in being “shrubbie,” and in not having “a smell so strong.”—Cf. DC. Prodr., vol. ii. p. 322; Gerard, p. 1421. The other North-American elder (S. pubens, Michx.) is at least equally near to the European S. racemosa, L., according to Prof. Gray.
[175] “There is a sort of dwarf-elder, that grows by the sea-side, that hath a red pith. The berries of both”—that is, of this and of the true elder mentioned above—“are smaller than English elder; not round, but corner’d.”—Voyages, p. 71. Gerard’s dwarf-elder (p. 1425) is Sambucus ebulus, L. Josselyn’s may have been a Viburnum; for this genus was confused with Sambucus by the elder botanists. Wood (New-England Prospect, chap. v.) speaks of—
“Small eldern, by the Indian fletchers sought;”—
which was perhaps arrow-wood, or Viburnum dentatum, L.
[176] Alnus, Tourn. One of the three New-England species (A. incana, Willd.) is common to Europe and America. Another (A. serrulata, Willd.) “bears so great a resemblance,” says F. A. Michaux, to the common European alder (A. glutinosa, Willd.) “in its flowers, its seeds, its leaves, its wood, and its bark, as to render a separate figure unnecessary; the only difference observable between them” being “that the European species is larger, and has smaller leaves.”—Sylva, vol. ii. p. 114. Compare Gray, Statistics, &c., l. c., p. 83. A. viridis, our third species, is common to Europe and this country.
[177] Corylus, L. Our species, which are peculiar to America, are both indicated: the “filberd, ... with hairy husks upon the nuts,” being C. rostrata, Ait. (beaked hazel); and that “setting hollow from the nut,”—that is, larger than the nut.—C. Americana, Wangenh. (common hazel).
[178] Carya, Nutt. In the Voyages, p. 69, the author speaks of the “walnut, which is divers: some bearing square nuts; others like ours, but smaller. There is likewise black walnut, of precious use for tables, cabinets, and the like” (Juglans nigra, L.). “The walnut-tree,” continues Josselyn, “is the toughest wood in the countrie, and therefore made use of for hoops and bowes; there being no yews there growing. In England, they made their bowes usually of witch-hasel” (that is, witch-elm,—Ulmus montana, Bauh., Lindl.; as see Gerard, p. 1481: but Carpinus, “in Essex, is called witch-hasell,”—ib.), “ash, yew, the best of outlandish elm; but the Indians make theirs of walnut.” This was hickory, and what Wood says belongs doubtless to the same. He calls it “something different from the English walnut; being a great deal more tough and more serviceable, and altogether heavy. And whereas our guns, that are stocked with English walnut, are soon broken and cracked in frost,—being a brittle wood,—we are driven to stock them new with the country walnut, which will endure all blows and weather; lasting time out of mind.” After speaking favorably of the fruit, he adds (New-Eng. Prospect, chap. vi.), “There is likewise a tree, in some parts of the country, that bears a nut as big as a pear,”—the butternut, doubtless (Juglans cinerea, L.). Josselyn has told us (p. 48) of the oil which the Indians managed to get from the acorns of the white oak. Roger Williams (Key, l. c., p. 220) says our native Americans made “of these walnuts ... an excellent oil, good for many uses, but especially for the anointing of their heads.” Michaux (Sylva, vol. i. p. 163) says the Indians used the oil of the butternut, and also (p. 185) of the shag-bark, “to season their aliments.” Williams adds (l. c.), “Of the chips of the walnut-tree—the bark taken off—some English in the country make excellent beer, both for taste, strength, colour, and inoffensive opening operation.”
[179] Castanea vesca, Gaertn.; common to Europe and America. Our chestnut is considered to differ from the European only as an American variety of a species common to both continents might be expected to. “The Indians have an art of drying their chestnuts, and so to preserve them in their barns for a dainty all the year.”—R. Williams, l. c.
[180] Neither Wood nor R. Williams makes mention of it. The younger Michaux considered our beech distinct from the European; but Mr. Nuttall makes it only a variety of it; while Prof. Gray puts both trees in his list of “very close representative species.”—Statistics, &c., l. c., p. 81.
[181] Fraxinus, L. Our species are peculiar to this continent. I cannot account for Wood’s saying, “It is different from the ash of England; being brittle and good for little, so that walnut is used for it.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. vi.
[182] Sorbus, L. (Gerard, p. 1473). Our mountain-ash (S. Americana, Willd.) is quite near to the quicken, or mountain-ash of the north of Europe (S. aucuparia, L.); but hardly, perhaps, to be reduced to an American variety of it, as the elder Michaux (Fl. Amer., vol. i. p. 290) proposed. Compare Gray, Statistics, &c., l. c., p. 82.
[183] Except the small white birch (B. populifolia, Ait.), which Mr. Spach reduces to a variety of the European B. alba, L.,—in which he is sustained by Prof. Gray (Man., p. 411),—and the dwarf-birch (B. nana, L.) of our alpine regions, all our species are peculiar to this continent.—See the author’s Voyages, p. 69, for another mention of the birches.
[184] Populus, L. Our species are peculiar to the country, as the author’s remark suggests. Wood (l. c.) notices “the ever-trembling asps.”
[185] “The plumbs of the country be better for plumbs than the cherries be for cherries. They be black and yellow; about the bigness of damsons; of a reasonable good taste.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v. Prunus maritima, Wangenh. (beech-plum), and P. Americana, Marsh. (wild yellow plum), are no doubt here intended; as also, it is likely, by Josselyn, who, it is evident, in this place had only the genus in mind as “common with us in England.”—[See p. 61] for the author’s mention of the “wild cherry.”
[186] Portulaca oleracea, L. (Gerard, p. 521). “In cornfields. It is eaten as a pot-herb, and esteemed by some as little inferior to asparagus.”—Cutler; Account of Indigenous Vegetables (1785), l. c., p. 447. Considered to have been introduced here; but our author enables us to carry back the date of its introduction, without reasonable doubt, to the first settlement of the country. “Purslain, Mr. Glover says, is also very common in Virginia, and troublesome too, to the tobacco-planters.” Sir Philip Skippon to Ray, Feb. 11, 1675-6, in Ray Society’s Corresp. of John Ray, p. 121. Mr. Nuttall regarded the species as indigenous on the plains of the Missouri; but this plant, “too closely resembling the common purslane,” according to Prof. Gray (Man., p. 64), has been separated as specifically distinct by Dr. Engelmann.
[187] Genista tinctoria, L. (Genistella tinctoria,—greenweed, or dyers’ weed; Gerard, p. 1316). “We shall not need to speake of the use that diers make thereof,” says the latter. Our author could hardly have been mistaken about so well-known a plant as this; which he probably met with in one of his visits to the neighborhood of Boston,—long the only American station for it. There is a tradition that it was introduced here by Gov. Endicott; which may have been some forty years before Josselyn finished his herborizing,—enough to account for its naturalization then. It was long confined to Salem (“pastures between New Mills and Salem,”—Cutler, l. c., 1785); but occurred to me sparingly, in 1841, on the shores of Cambridge Bay, and also on roadsides in Old Cambridge. “Woad-seed” is set down, in a memorandum of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, before February, 1628, to be sent to New England (Mass. Col. Rec., vol. i. p. 24); and though Isatis tinctoria, L., is true woad, Reseda luteola, L. (wold, or weld), and our Genista (woadwaxen), have, it is said (Rees’s Cycl., in loco), been known “in English herbals under that name.”
[188] “Current-bushes are of two kinds,—red and black. The black currents, which are larger than the red, ... are reasonable pleasant in eating.”—Voyages, p. 72. Our black currant is Ribes floridum, Herit.,—considered by Linnæus (Sp. Pl., p. 291) only a variety of R. nigrum, L., the true black currant of the gardens; and our red currant, which I have gathered in the White Mountains,—far below the region of R. rigens, Michx., the more common red currant there,—appears to be undistinguishable from R. rubrum, L. (the red currant of gardens); unless, possibly, as an American variety of it. This is probably R. albinervium, Michx. (Fl., vol. i. p. 110; Pursh, Fl., vol. i. p. 163).
[189] Polyporus, Mich., sp.—In his Voyages, p. 70, the author speaks of “a stately tree growing here and there in valleys, not like to any trees in Europe; having a smooth bark, of a dark-brown colour, the leaves like great maple in England called sycamor; but larger,”—which may be Platanus occidentalis, L. (button-wood). And Wood enables us to add one more to this early account of the genera of plants, which we possess, common to the Old World. He tells us (New-England’s Prospect, chap. v.) “the hornbound tree is a tough kind of wood, that requires so much pains in riving as is almost incredible; being the best to make bowls and dishes, not being subject to crack or leak. This tree growing with broad-spread arms, the vines twist their curling branches about them; which vines afford great store of grapes,” &c. This was our American hornbeam (Carpinus Americana, L.). And the same author again alludes to it, in verse, as—
“The horn-bound tree, that to be cloven scorns;
Which from the tender vine oft takes his spouse,
Who twines embracing arms about his boughs.”
A pleasant enough illustration of what taught classical husbandry,—“ulmis adjungere vites.”—Georg., i. 2.
[190] See also the Voyages, p. 73. “It is almost incredible,” says Higginson (New-England’s Plantation, l. c., p. 118), “what great gaine some of our English planters have had by our Indian corne. Credible persons have assured me,—and the partie himselfe avouched the truth of it to me,—that, of the setting of thirteen gallons of corne, hee hath had encrease of it 52 hogsheads; every hogshead holding seven bushels, of London measure: and every bushell was by him sold and trusted to the Indians for so much beaver as was worth 18 shillings. And so, of this 13 gallons of corne, which was worth 6 shillings 8 pence, he made about 327 pounds of it the yeere following, as by reckoning will appeare; where you may see how God blessed husbandry in this land. There is not such greate and plentifull eares of corne, I suppose, any where else to bee found but in this countrey; because, also of varietie of colours,—as red, blew, and yellow, &c.: and of one corne there springeth four or five hundred.” Roger Williams (Key, l. c., pp. 208, 221) has some interesting particulars of the Indian use of their corn. According to him, the Indian msickquatash (that is succotash, as we call it now) was “boiled corn whole,” and nawsaump, a kind of meal pottage unparched. From this the English call their samp; which is the Indian corn beaten and boiled, and eaten, hot or cold; with milk or butter,—which are mercies beyond the natives’ plain water, and which is a dish exceeding wholesome for the English bodies.
[191] Acorus Calamus, L.; common to Europe and America. In his Voyages, p. 77, the author drops properly, in mentioning this, the injurious prefix. It seems that our New-England forefathers used the leaves to cover their cold floors, as they had used rushes at home; and, according to Sir W. J. Hooker (Br. Fl., vol. i. p. 159), the pleasant smell of the plant has recommended it, in like manner, “for strewing on the floor of the cathedral at Norwich, on festival days.”
[192] Allium Canadense, L., probably.—See also p. 55, note 4.
[193] “Knaves’-mustard (for that it is too bad for honest men).”—Gerard, p. 262. The “New-England mustard,” which was like it, may be Lepidium Virginicum, L.; which, having “a taste like common garden-cress, or peppergrass” (Bigel., Fl. Bost., in loco), perhaps attracted the first settlers.
[194] The “many flowers,” with reflexed sepals, perhaps refer this to our noble American Turk’s-cap (Lilium superbum, L.), rather than to the yellow lily (L. Canadense, L.).
[196] “They take their wuttammauog,—that is, a weak tobacco,—which the men plant themselves, very frequently. Yet I never see any take so excessively as I have seen men in Europe; and yet excess were more tolerable in them, because they want the refreshing of beer and wine, which God had vouchsafed Europe.”—R. Williams, Key, l. c., p. 213. And, in another place, the same writer says that tobacco is “commonly the only plant which men labour in” (he is speaking of the Indians); “the women managing all the rest” (p. 208). Wood, in his list of Indian words (New-Eng. Prospect, ad ult.), spells the Indian word, above given, ottommaocke,—(perhaps both are comparable with “wuttahimneash, strawberries” Williams, l. c., p. 220), and “weetimoquat, it smells sweet” (Vocab. of Narraganset Lang., in Hist. Coll., vol. v. p. 82); og, ock, and ash, being all plural terminations; between which and “the noun in the singular one or more consonants or vowels are frequently interspersed” (ibid., vol. iii. p. 222, note); and oquat, from the context, the verbal; and the root appearing possibly the same,—and also defines it as tobacco. There is much other testimony that the New-England savages were found using “tobacco” (as Mourt’s Relation, l. c., p. 230; and Winslow’s Relation, l. c., p. 253); but our author’s text, above, appears to distinguish the true herb, “not much planted,” from “a small kind called pooke,” which “the Indians make use of.” And again, more clearly, in his Voyages, we have to the same effect: “the Indians in New England use a small, round-leafed tobacco, called by them or the fishermen poke. It is odious to the English.... Of marchantable ... tobacco, ... there is little of it planted in New England; neither have they” (both clauses appear to refer to the English) “learned the right way of curing of it.” This “marchantable tobacco” was no doubt mainly Nicotiana tabacum, L.; but the other kind, the weak tobacco,—cultivated, as Williams tells us, by the Indians, and recognized as tobacco by the English,—was not, as Wood says (N. E. Prospect, l. c.), colt’s-foot, but Nicotiana rustica, L. (the yellow henbane of Gerard’s Herbal, p. 356), well known to have been long in cultivation among the American savages, and now a naturalized relic of that cultivation in various parts of the United States. The name, poke, or pooke,—if it be, as is supposable, the same with “puck, smoke,” of the Narraganset vocabulary of R. Williams (Hist. Coll., vol. v. p. 84),—was perhaps always indefinite, and, since Cutler’s day, has been applied in New England to the green hellebore (Veratrum viride, Ait.); but this was not, it is evident, the poke of the first settlers. The name is also given to Phytolacca decandra, L. (the skoke of Cutler), and the hellebore apparently distinguished from this as Indian poke; but the application of the name to the former, at least, probably had its origin among the whites.
[197] The figure sufficiently exhibits Sarracenia purpurea, L.
[198] “Live-for-ever. It is a kind of cud-weed.... It growes now plentifully in our English gardens.... The fishermen, when they want” (that is, lack) “tobacco, take this herb; being cut and dryed.”—Voyages, p. 78; where the author adds the peculiar medicinal virtues of the plant, which are the same as those assigned by Gerard (p. 644) to the genus. Compare, as to this, Wood and Bache, Dispens., p. 1334. The species intended by Josselyn is our everlasting (Antennaria margaritacea (L.) Br.), described by Gerard, and figured by Johnson in his edition of the former (p. 641), and first published by Clusius (Gnaphalium Americanum, Rar. Pl. Hist., vol. i. p. 327) in 1601. Clusius had it from England, says Johnson. The dried herb, used by the fishermen instead of tobacco, and no doubt called by them poke, may have been mistaken by Wood for colt’s-foot, the leaves of which were “smoked by the ancients in pulmonary complaints; ... and, in some parts of Germany, are at the present time said to be substituted for tobacco.”—Wood and Bache, Dispens., p. 1401. Cornus sericea, L.,—“called by the natives squaw-bush” (Williamson’s Hist. Maine, vol. i. p. 125), and by the western Indians kinnikinnik (Gray, Man., p. 161); furnished, in its inner bark (on the medicinal properties of which, see especially Rees’s Cycl., Amer. ed., in loco), a substitute for Nicotiana,—very widely approved among the native Americans. The name, Indian tobacco, given to Lobelia inflata, L. (the emetic-weed of Cutler, l. c., p. 484; who “first attracted to it the attention of the profession”), by the whites, is in some connections confusing, and might well be displaced by wild tobacco, which is also in popular use.
[199] Œnothera biennis, L. (Johnson’s Gerard, p. 475),—known to Europeans, according to Linnæus (Sp. Pl., p. 493), as early as 1614; but first described and figured by Prosper Alpinus, in his posthumous De Pl. Exoticis, p. 325, t. 324, cit. L. Johnson says that Parkinson gave it the English name of tree-primrose, which it still keeps. It is “vulgarly known by the name of scabish (a corruption, probably of scabious)” in the country.—Bigel. Fl. Bost., in loco. Josselyn describes the plant in his Voyages, p. 78.
[200] Adiantum pedatum, L.—The European A. Camillus veneris, L., long used as a pectoral (the sirop de capillaire of French shops being made of it), is, according to Messrs. Wood and Bache (Dispens., p. 1290), “feebler” than our species, which Josselyn recommends.
[202] Johnson’s Gerard, p. 183: which is perhaps Allium magicum, L.; for which our A. tricoccum, Ait., may have been mistaken.—[See also p. 54] of this; note.
[203] Epilobium angustifolium, L. (rosebay willow-herbe of Gerard by Johnson); which last figures it at p. 477: common to Europe and America; but some botanists have, like Josselyn, reckoned the American plant “proper to the country.”
[204] Helianthus, L. (Gerard, p. 751), a genus peculiar to America; called “American marygold” in the Voyages (p. 59), where it is set down among the more striking of our New-England flowers. [At p. 82] of this book, the author gives a cut of the “marygold of America,” which he describes. It is probably the second one above mentioned, and perhaps H. strumosus, L., Gray. The other kind, with “black seeds,” was probably H. divaricatus, L.
[205] [See p. 47]. The earth-nuts of Gerard (p. 1064) are species of Bulbocastanum of authors.
[206] Not clear to me. But, taking the alleged virtues and the station into account, our author may mean here the rather striking American sea-rocket (Cakile Americana, Nutt.); which, it is likely, occurred to him. Spurge-time [(p. 43)] also grows on “sea-banks.”
[207] “French beans; or, rather, American beans. The herbalists call them kidney-beans, from their shape and effects; for they strengthen the kidneys. They are variegated much,—some being bigger, a great deal, than others; some white, black, red, yellow, blue, spotted: besides your Bonivis, and Calavances, and the kidney-bean that is proper to Ronoake. But these are brought into the country: the other are natural to the climate.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 73-4. R. Williams (Key, l. c., p. 208) gives manusquussedash as the Indian word for beans. Cornuti (whose book, indeed, is not confined to Canadian plants; though, on the other hand, he was sometimes ill informed of the true locality of his specimens; as in the case of Asclepias Cornuti, Decsne, which he published as A. Syriaca) figures and describes, at pp. 184-5, Phaseolus multiflorus, L.; and this may possibly have been raised from seeds procured by French missionaries from the Canadian savages: but P. vulgaris, L., our well-known bush-bean, is doubtless what Josselyn has mainly in view, as cultivated by the native Americans.
[208] “Askutasquash,—their vine-apples,—which the English, from them, call squashes: about the bigness of apples of several colours.”—R. Williams, Key, &c., l. c., p. 222. “In summer, when their corn is spent, isquotersquashes is their best bread; a fruit much like a pumpion.”—Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, part 2, chap. vi. The late Dr. T. W. Harris made the ill-understood edible gourds a special object of study, and devoted particular attention to the ascertaining of the kinds cultivated by the American savages; but his papers have not as yet seen the light. The warted squash (Cucurbita verrucosa, L.) and the orange-gourd (C. aurantium, Willd.)—the fruit of which last is of the size and color of an orange, and “more tender than the common pompion” (Loudon, Encycl. Pl.)—are perhaps, in part, intended by our author.
[209] “Pompions and water-mellons, too, they have good store,” says our author (Voyages, p. 130); and again, at p. 74 of the same, “The water-melon is proper to the countrie. The flesh of it is of a flesh-colour; a rare cooler of feavers, and excellent against the stone.” The water-melon (Cucurbita citrullus, L.) is “the only medicine the common people use in ardent fevers,” in Egypt (Loudon, l. c.). Cucurbita pepo, L. (Gr. πέπων; Low Dutch, pepoen, pompoen; Fr., pompone), is our English pompion, or pumpkin. At p. 91, Josselyn speaks of pompions “proper to the country.” Compare Gerard’s chapter “of melons, or pompions” (Johnson’s Gerard, p. 918), where are two Virginian sorts; and see “the ancient New-England standing dish,” [at p. 91] of this book. The evidence appears to be sufficient, that our savages had in cultivation, together with their corn and tobacco,—and, like these, derived originally from tropical regions,—several sorts of what we call squashes, some kinds of pompion, and also water-melons; and, Graves’s letter (New-England Plantation, l. c., p. 124) adds, musk-melons. See further, especially, Champlain (Voy. de la Nouv. France, passim) and L’Escarbot (Hist. de la Nouv. France, vol. ii. p. 836). Mr. A. De Candolle (Geogr. Bot., vol. ii. pp. 899, 904) disputes the American origin of the edible gourds, but does not appear to have examined all the early authorities for their cultivation by the savages before the settlement of this country. Such cultivation appears to be made out, and to indicate that these vegetables have probably been known, from very remote antiquity, in the warmer parts of America. But this does not touch the difficult question of origin; and it may still appear that the gourds are equally ancient in Europe, and derived, both here and there, from Asia (De Cand., l. c.); such derivation being explainable, in the case of America, by old migrations from Asia through Polynesia.—Pickering, Races of Man, chap. 17.
[210] Johnson’s Gerard, p. 528; where the same plant is also called “jagged or rose penniwoort,” and is probably what our author intends [at p. 43] of this. It was no doubt our pretty Saxifraga Virginiensis, Michx., which Josselyn had in view. In his Voyages, p. 80, he assigns to it the medicinal virtues which Gerard attributes to the great navel-wort, or wall-pennywort (Cotyledon umbilicus, Huds.).
[211] Convolvulus sepium, L. (great bind-weed) is exceedingly like to C. Scammonia, L., the inspissated juice of which is the officinal scammony; and is common to Europe and North America. Gerard’s bryony of Peru (p. 872-3), to which Josselyn refers, is, whatever it be, not found here. Compare Cutler’s remarks on C. sepium (Account of Veg., &c., l. c., p. 416). Mechoacan, “called ... Indian briony, or briony, or scammony of America,” from the Caribbee Islands, &c., is described in Hughes, Amer. Physitian (1672), p. 94; and see Wood and Bache, Dispens., p. 424, note.
[212] Rosa Carolina, L. (Carolina rose), probably.—See Cutler’s observations, l. c., p. 451. Higginson also notices “single damaske roses, verie sweete.”—New-Eng. Plantation, l. c., p. 119. Our Carolina rose is said to be common in English shrubberies.
[213] See also Voyages, p. 72. Our author is the earliest authority that I have met with for this name; and his plant, which is placed among those “proper to the country,” may very well be what has long been called sweet-fern in New England,—Comptonia asplenifolia (L.) Ait.; still used in “molasses beer,” and medicinal in the way mentioned.—Emerson, Trees and Shrubs of Mass., p. 226.
[214] See Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 77. The first of the two plants which the author mentions here is probably Aralia nudicaulis, L. (wild sarsaparilla); and the other, A. hispida, Michx. The last, which is what is spoken of in the Voyages, has been recommended for medicinal properties by Prof. Peck.—Wood and Bache, Dispens., p. 116.
[215] “Attitaash (whortleberries), of which there are divers sorts; sweet, like currants; some opening, some of a binding nature. Sautaash are these currants dried by the natives, and so preserved all the year; which they beat to powder, and mingle it with their parched meal, and make a delicate dish which they call sautauthig, which is as sweet to them as plum or spice cake to the English.”—R. Williams, Key, &c., l. c., p. 221. The fruitful and wholesome American whortleberries, or bilberries, were, it is likely, a very pleasant discovery to our forefathers. It was, no doubt, those species that we call blueberries which they made most of, and particularly the low blueberry (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum, Lam.) and the swamp-blueberry (V. corymbosum, L.). From these the common black whortleberry (Gaylussacia resinosa, Torr. and Gray) differs no less in quality than in structure. Sa’té (compare sautaash, above), in Rasles Dict. of the Abnaki Language, l. c., p. 450, is rendered “frais, sans etre secs; lorsq’ils s’t secs, sikisa’tar.”
[216] The cloud-berry—Rubus chamæmorus, L. (Gerard, p. 1420)—is found in some parts of the subalpine region of the White Mountains; and Mr. Oakes detected it at Lubec, on the coast of Maine. It is common to both continents; and perhaps, therefore, as our author gives his cloud-berry a place in this division of his book, he may have meant something else.
[217] Rhus, L.; the species differing, as our author repeats in his Voyages (p. 71), “from all the kinds set down in our English herbals.” Wood (N. Eng. Prospect, chap, v.) calls it “the dear shumach.” Josselyn’s account of the virtues of our species, here, and especially in the Voyages (l. c.), agrees so well with what Gerard says of the properties of the European tanner’s sumach (R. coriaria, L.), that the latter may very likely have, in part, suggested the former. But see Cutler, l. c., p. 427.
[218] “The cherry-trees yield great store of cherries, which grow on clusters like grapes. They be much smaller than our English cherry; nothing near so good, if they be not fully ripe. They so furr the mouth, that the tongue will cleave to the roof, and the throat wax hoarse with swallowing those red bullies (as I may call them); being little better in taste” (that is, than bullaces). “English ordering may bring them to an English cherry; but they are as wild as the Indians.”—New-England’s Prospect, chap. v. The choke-cherry (Cerasus Virginiana (L.) DC.) and the wild cherry (C. serotina (Ehrh.) DC.) are meant.
[219] Pinus Strobus, L. (white pine). “Of the body the English make large canows of 20 foot long, and two foot and a half over; hollowing of them with an adds, and shaping of the outside like a boat.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 64; where is more concerning the use of this tree in medicine. “I have seen,” says Wood, “of these stately, high-grown trees, ten miles together, close by the river-side; from whence, by shipping, they might be conveyed to any desired port.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v.
[220] Abies balsamea (L.) Marsh, (balsam-fir). “The firr-tree is a large tree, too; but seldom so big as the pine. The bark is smooth, with knobs, or blisters, in which lyeth clear liquid turpentine,—very good to be put into salves and oyntments. The leaves, or cones, boiled in beer, are good for the scurvie. The young buds are excellent to put into epithemes for warts and corns. The rosen is altogether as good as frankincense.... The knots of this tree and fat-pine are used by the English instead of candles; and it will burn a long time: but it makes the people pale” (Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 66); besides being, as Wood says (l. c., speaking of the pine), “something sluttish.” But Higginson says they “are very usefull in a house, and ... burne as cleere as a torch.”—New-Eng. Plantation, l. c., p. 122.
[221] Larix Americana, Michx. (Larch; “taccamahac,” Cutler; tamarack; hackmatack.) “Groundsels, made of larch-tree, will never rot; and the longer it lyes, the harder it growes, that you may almost drive a nail into a bar of iron as easily as into that.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 68. “The turpentine that issueth from the cones of the larch-tree (which comes nearest of any to the right turpentine) is singularly good to heal wounds, and to draw out the malice (or thorn, as Helmont phrases it) of any ach; rubbing the place therewith, and throwing upon it the powder of sage-leaves.”—Ibid., p. 66.
[222] Abies nigra, Poir. (black or double spruce), and probably also A. alba, Michx. (white or single spruce). “At Pascataway there is now a spruce-tree, brought down to the water-side by our mass-men, of an incredible bigness, and so long that no skipper durst ever yet adventure to ship it; but there it lyes and rots.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 67.
[223] Abies Canadensis (L.), Michx. (hemlock spruce). Beside the coniferous trees here set down, our author mentions in his Voyages (p. 67) “the white cedar, ... a stately tree, and is taken by some to be tamarisk.” This, which is probably our white cedar (Cupressus thyoides, L.), he says “the English saw into boards to floor their rooms; for which purpose it is excellent, long-lasting, and wears very smooth and white. Likewise they make shingles to cover their houses with, instead of tyle. It will never warp.” Wood (New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v.) makes mention of a “cedar-tree, ... a tree of no great growth; not bearing above a foot and a half, at the most; neither is it very high.... This wood is more desired for ornament than substance; being of colour red and white, like eugh; smelling as sweet as juniper. It is commonly used for ceiling of houses, and making of chests, boxes, and staves.” This seems likely to have been the American Arbor vitæ (Thya occidentalis, L.); also called white-cedar.—Compare Emerson, Trees and Shrubs of Mass., pp. 96, 100. For mention of the juniper, [see ante, p. 49].
[224] [See p. 81]; and [ante, p. 54].
[225] Sassafras officinale, Nees. “This tree growes not beyond Black Point, eastward.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 68. Michaux (Sylva, vol. ii. p. 144) says, “The neighbourhood of Portsmouth ... may be assumed as one of the extreme points at which it is found towards the north-east;” but, according to Mr. Emerson (Trees and Shrubs of Mass., p. 322), it is “found as far north as Canada,” though ... “there a small tree.”
[226] Vaccinium macrocarpum, Ait. Our author seems not to have known the European cranberry (V. oxycoccus, L., the marish-wortes, or fenne-berries, of Gerard, p. 1419); which is also found in our cold bogs, especially upon mountains. This is called by Sir W. J. Hooker (Br. Fl., vol. i. p. 178), “far superior to the foreign V. macrocarpon;” but, from Gerard’s account, it should appear that it was formerly much less thought of in England than was ours (according to Josselyn) here, by both Indians and English. Linnæus speaks of the European fruit in much the same way, in 1737, in his Flora of Lapland, where he says, “Baccæ hæ a Lapponibus in usum cibarium non vocantur, nec facile ab aliis nationibus, cum nimis acidæ sint” (Fl. Lapp., p. 145): but corrects this in a paper on the esculent plants of Sweden, in 1752; asking, not without animation, “Harum vero cum saccharo præparata gelatina, quid in mensis nostris jucundius?” (Amæn. Acad., t. iii. p. 86.) Our American cranberry was probably the “sasemineash—another sharp, cooling fruit, growing in fresh waters all the winter; excellent in conserve against fevers”—of R. Williams, Key, l. c., p. 221.—Compare Masimin, rendered [fruits] “rouges petits.”—Rasles’ Dict., Abnaki, l. c., p. 460.
[227] Wood says the “vines afford great store of grapes, which are very big, both for the grape and cluster; sweet and good. These be of two sorts,—red and white. There is likewise a smaller kind of grape which groweth in the islands” (that is, of Massachusetts Bay), “which is sooner ripe, and more delectable; so that there is no known reason why as good wine may not be made in those parts, as well as Bordeaux in France; being under the same degree.”—New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v. “Vines,” says Mr. Graves (in New-Eng. Plantation, Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 124) “doe grow here, plentifully laden with the biggest grapes that ever I saw. Some I have seene foure inches about.”—“Our Governour,” adds Higginson, “hath already planted a vineyard, with great hope of encrease.”—New-England’s Plantation, l. c., p. 119. Vitis Labrusca, L. (fox-grape),—for some principal varieties of which, see Emerson, l. c., p. 468,—furnished, probably, most of the sorts known favorably to the first settlers; but V. æstivalis, Michx. (summer grape), also occurs on our seaboard.
[228] Pyrola, L., emend. (Gerard, p. 408). All but one of our species are common also to Europe.
[229] Goodyera pubescens (Willd.), R. Br., is plainly meant by the author; and the common name of the plant—rattlesnake plantain—still preserves the memory of its supposed virtues as a wound-herb. It seems, by the next page, that Josselyn tried to carry living specimens to England; but they “perished at sea.” The putting this among the Pyrolæ (as if by some confusion of Goodyera with Chimophila maculata) was a bad mistake.
[230] [See p. 55]; where the author refers to his figures of two kinds of “Pyrola” of which this must be one. The Voyages (p. 202) also make mention of an adventure of a neighbor of Josselyn’s, who, “rashly wandering out after some stray’d cattle, lost his way; and coming, as we conceived by his Relation, near to the head-spring of some of the branches of Black-Point River or Saco River, light into a tract of land, for God knows how many miles, full of delfes and dingles and dangerous precipices, rocks, and inextricable difficulties, which did justly daunt, yea, quite deter him from endeavouring to pass any further.” And this account may quite possibly relate to the same occasion of our author’s getting acquainted with his “elegant plant.” Plukenet (Amalth., p. 94; Phytogr., tab. 287, f. 5) mistakenly refers Josselyn’s “sufficiently unhappy figure” to his Filix Hemionitis dicta Maderensis; which is Adiantum reniforme, L.
[231] “There is a plant, likewise,—called, for want of a name, clowne’s wound-wort, by the English; though it be not the same,—that will heal a green wound in 24 hours, if a wise man have the ordering of it.”—Voyages, p. 60. Verbena hastata, L. (blue vervain), is perhaps, notwithstanding the author’s disclaimer, what he had in view. This is certainly different from the common, once officinal, vervain of Europe (V. officinalis, L.),—on the virtues of which, as a wound-herb, see Gerard, p. 718; but yet more so from true clown’s all-heal (Gerard, p. 1005), which is Stachys palustris, L. As to other medicinal properties of our vervains, compare Cutler, l. c., p. 405,—where they are said to have been used by the surgeons of our army in the Revolutionary War,—and Wood and Bache, Dispens., p. 1403.
[232] Symplocarpus fœtidus (L.) Salisb. (skunk-cabbage). Our author’s appears to be the first figure and account of this curious plant, which he rightly places among such “as are proper to the country, and have no name.” Cutler’s description, in 1785 (Account of Indig. Veg., l. c., pp. 407-9),—which is followed by the remark, that “the fructification so essentially differs from all the genera of this order, it must undoubtedly be considered as a new genus,”—was the next contribution of importance, and so continued till Dr. Bigelow’s elaborate history;—Amer. Med. Bot., vol. ii. p. 41, pl. xxiv. Josselyn’s “sprig” of a horse-tail might perhaps be added to his Filices, at p. 47, note 2, 3.
[233] Impatiens fulva, Nutt, (touch-me-not; balsam). Wilson says this plant “is the greatest favorite with the humming-bird of all our other flowers. In some places where these plants abound, you may see at one time ten or twelve humming-birds darting about, and fighting with and pursuing each other.”—Amer. Ornithol., by Brewer, p. 120. As to Josselyn’s note on its use in medicine by the Indians, compare Wood and Bache, Disp., p. 1345. A kix, or kex, or kexy,—used in the expression, “hollow as a kix,”—is a provincialism, in various parts of England, for hemlock; “the dry, hollow stocks of hemlock” (whence Webster’s query,—Fr., cique; Lat. cicuta); and also of cow-parsley, according to Holloway (Dict. of Provincialisms): that is to say, secondarily, any hollow-stemmed plant like hemlock. Gerard’s figure of Impatiens noli tangere, L., the European balsam,—of which the earlier botanists considered our species to be varieties,—is so poor, and the plant so rare in Britain, that it is perhaps little wonder that our author took the showy American balsam to be quite new.
[234] Mulgedium leucophœum, DC. (Gray, Manual, p. 241). This fine plant is peculiar to America.
[235] Nabalus albus (L.) Hook. (Snake-weed): the genus peculiar to America.
[236] Chelone glabra, L. (snake-head). Plukenet quotes this figure under Digitalis Verbesinæ foliis, &c. (Amalth., p. 71; Mant., p. 64); which is referred by Linnæus to Gerardia pedicularis, L. Plukenet has himself figured our plant, and but little better than Josselyn, in Phytogr., t. 348, fig. 3. The genus is peculiar to America.
[237] Upon this figure, Plukenet founds his Solanum quadrifolium Nov’ Anglicanum, flore lacteo polycoccum (Amalth., p. 195); clearly taking the plant, as Josselyn did, for “a kind of Herba Paris” (Paris quadrifolia, L.), which is Solanum quadrifolium bacciferum of Bauhin (Pin., p. 167, cit. L.). The plant is doubtless Cornus Canadensis, L. (dwarf-cornel; bunch-berry); and it certainly resembles the figure of Herb Paris, given by Gerard (p. 405), much more than that of Cornus suecica, L. (European dwarf-cornel, p. 1296),—a shrub ill understood by the old botanists.
[238] Helianthus, L., sp. (sun-flower); a genus peculiar to America. The species is perhaps H. strumosus, L. (Gray, Man., p. 218).—[See p. {56}] of this book; note.
[239] The importance of this list has been already spoken of. Its value depends on its having been drawn up by a person of familiarity with some of the botanical writers of his day, as part of a botanical treatise; and the (in this case) not unfair presumption that the names cited are meant to be accurate. Mr. A. De Candolle (Geogr. Botanique, vol. ii. p. 746) appears to be unacquainted with any authority for the naturalized plants of the Northern States earlier than the first edition of the Florula of Dr. Bigelow, in 1814. The treatise of Cutler extends this limit to 1785; and that of Josselyn, so far as it goes, to 1672.
[240] Doubtful. Gerard’s couch-grass, p. 23, appears to be Holcus mollis, L.,—“the true couch-grass of sandy soils” in England; and English agricultural writers reckon yet other grasses of this name, beside the well-known Triticum repens, L.
[241] Gerard, p. 276,—Capsella Bursa Pastoris (L.), Moench. “Cornfields, and about barns,”—Cutler (1785), l. c. Naturalized.
[242] Gerard, p. 290,—Taraxacum Dens Leonis, Desf.; looked, to our author, like a new-comer. Dr. Gray (Man., p. 239; and comp. Torr, and Gray, Fl., vol. ii. p. 494) regards it as “probably indigenous in the north,” but only naturalized in other regions. “Grass land,”—Cutler (1785), l. c.
[243] Gerard, p. 278,—Senecio vulgaris, L.; one of the adventive naturalized plants, as defined by Mr. De Candolle (l. c., vol. ii. p. 688; and Gray, Man. Bot., pref., p. viii.), according to the evidence of Dr. Darlington (Fl. Cestr., p. 152), and Gray, l. c. It has long been a common weed in eastern New England.
[244] Sonchus, L. S. oleraceus, L., as understood by Linnæus, was no doubt intended: but this is now taken to include two species, both recognized in this country (Gray, l. c., p. 241); between which there is no evidence to authorize a decision.
[245] The genera Chenopodium, L., and Atriplex, L., were much confused in Josselyn’s day; and his wild orach may belong to either. Gerard’s wild orach is in part Atriplex patula, L. (p. 326); but the first species to which he gives this name (p. 325) is Chenopodium polyspermum, L. The latter is a rare, adventive member of our Flora (Gray, l. c., p. 363); and the former is, according to Bigelow (Fl. Bost., ed. 3, p. 401), the well-known orach of our salt-marshes: but Dr. Gray now refers this (Man., p. 365) to the nearly allied A. hastata, L. This plant, in either case, is reckoned truly common to both continents. It is possible that Josselyn intended it.
[246] Garden nightshade (Gerard, p. 339); Solanum nigrum, L. “Common among rubbish,”—Cutler (1785), l. c. Naturalized.
[247] Common stinging-nettle, or great nettle (Gerard, p. 706),—Urtica dioica, L.
[248] Field-mallow (Gerard, p. 930), Malva sylvestris, L., and wild dwarf-mallow (ibid.), M. rotundifolia, L., are the only sorts likely to have been in view. The latter was, I doubt not, intended; and the former, adventive only with us, may also have occurred at any period after the settlement.
[249] “It is but one sort, and that is broad-leaved plantain” (Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 188). Broad-leaved plantain (Gerard, p. 419),—Plantago major, L.; one of the most anciently and widely known of plants, and inhabiting, at present, all the great divisions of the earth. An account, similar to our author’s, of the name given to it by the American savages, is found in Kalm’s Travels. “Mr. Bartram had found this plant in many places on his travels; but he did not know whether it was an original American plant, or whether the Europeans had brought it over. This doubt had its rise from the savages (who always had an extensive knowledge of the plants of the country) pretending that this plant never grew here before the arrival of the Europeans. They therefore gave it a name which signifies the Englishman’s foot; for they say, that, where a European had walked, there this plant grew in his footsteps.”—Kalm’s Travels into North America, by Forster, vol. i. p. 92. But Dr. Pickering considers it possible, that, in North-west America at least, the plantain was introduced by the aborigines (Races of Man, pp. 317, 320): and, uncertain as this is admitted to be, the old vulgar names of the plant in Northern languages—as Wegerich and Wegetritt of the German, Weegblad and Weegbree of the Dutch, Veibred of the Danish, and Weybred of old English, all pointing to the plantain’s growing on ways trodden by man—suggest, perhaps, a far older supposed relation between this plant and the human foot than that mentioned above; and thus favor the derivation of the original Latin name (as old as Pliny, H. N., vol. xxv. 8, in § 39) from planta, the sole of the foot,—whether because the plantain is always trodden on, or, taking the termination go in plantago, as some philologists take it, to signify likeness (as doubtless in lappago, mollugo, asperugo; but this signification does not appear so clear in some other words with the like ending), because its leaves resemble the sole of the foot in flatness, breadth, marking, and so on. The possible derivation from planta, a plant, “per excellentiam, quasi plantam præstantissimam” (Tournef., Inst., vol. i. p. 128), though less open to question than that of Linnæus (“planta tangenda,” Phil. Bot., § 234), is certainly less significant than the other; which, with the statements (independent, so far as appears, of each other) of Josselyn and Kalm, if these may be relied on, seems to point to a very ancient co-incidence of thought, not unworthy of attention. Something else of the same sort is to be found in R. Williams, where he says (Key, l. c., p. 218) that the Massachusetts Indians called the constellation of the Great Bear mosk, or pawkunnawaw; that is, the bear.
[250] Gerard, p. 353,—Hyoscyamus niger, L. Adventive only: having “escaped from gardens to roadsides,” according to Dr. Gray (Man., p. 340); but “common amongst rubbish and by roadsides,” in 1785 (Cutler, l. c.), and perhaps long known on the coasts of Massachusetts Bay.
[251] Broad-leaved wormwood, “our common and best-knowne wormwood” (Gerard, p. 1096),—Artemisia absynthium, L. “Roadsides and amongst rubbish,” 1785,—Cutler, l. c. Omitted by Bigelow, and not very frequent.
[252] Gerard, p. 388. If this is to be taken for Rumex acutus, Sm. (Fl. Brit.), which seems not to be certain, it is now referable to R. conglomeratus, Murr., which is “sparingly introduced” with us, according to Gray (Man., p. 377). But it is more likely that Josselyn had R. crispus, L. (curled dock), in view: which is, I suppose, the “varietie” of sharp-pointed dock, “with crisped or curled leaves,” of Johnson’s Gerard, p. 387; and is the only mention of the species by those authors.
[253] Gerard, p. 389,—Rumex Patientia, L. This and the next were garden pot-herbs of repute: and, at p. 90, our author brings them in again as such; telling us that bloodwort grows “but sorrily,” but patience “very pleasantly.” This may very likely have crept out of some garden: but the great water-dock (R. Hydrolapathum, Huds.) is, says Gerard, “not unlike to the garden patience” (p. 390); and Dr. Gray says the same of the American variety of the former.—Man., p. 377.
[254] Gerard, p. 390,—Rumex sanguineus, L., “sown for a pot-herb in most gardens” (Gerard); and so our author, [p. 90]. Linnæus took it to be originally American: but it is common in Europe; and Dr. Gray marks the American plant as naturalized. Dr. Torrey indicated the species as occurring about New York in 1819 (Catal. Pl., N.Y.); but New-England botanists do not appear to have recognized it. Josselyn’s plant was perhaps the offcast of some garden.
[255] Gerard, p. 404.—Compare [p. 42] of this; where our author more correctly reckons it among plants truly common to Europe and America.
[256] “Common knot-grasse” (Gerard, p. 565),—Polygonum aviculare, L. Common to all the great divisions of the earth, and reckoned indigenous in America.—De Cand. Geogr. Bot., vol. i. p. 577; Gray, Man., p. 373.
[257] There are many chickweeds in Gerard; but that most likely to have been in the author’s view here is the universally known common chickweed,—the middle or small chickweed of Gerard, p. 611. This was “common in gardens and rich cultivated ground” in 1785.—Cutler, l. c. Few plants have spread so widely over the earth as Stellaria media.
[258] Great comfrey (Gerard, p. 806),—Symphytum officinale, L.: also in the list of garden herbs at p. 90. “Sometimes found growing wild,”—Cutler (1785), l. c. Not admitted by Dr. Bigelow (Fl. Bost.), but included by Dr. Gray as an adventive.—Man., p. 320.
[259] Gerard, p. 757,—Maruta cotula (L.), DC.; a naturalized member of our Flora, now become a very common ornament of roadsides; where Cutler notices it, also, in 1785.
[260] “Great burre-docke, or clott-burre” (Gerard, p. 809),—Lappa major, Gaertn. “About barns,”—Cutler (1785), l. c.
[261] “White-floured mullein” (Gerard, p. 773),—perhaps Verbascum Lychnitis, L.; which is adventive in some parts of the United States (Gray, Man., p. 283), but is not otherwise known to have made its appearance in New England. Great mullein (V. Thapsus, L.) was “common” in Cutler’s time. The moth-mullein (V. Blattaria, L.) he only knew “by roadsides in Lynn” (l. c., p. 419). Other plants referable to this list of naturalized weeds are “wild sorrel,” [p. 42]; Polygonum Persicaria, p. 43; St. John’s wort, speedwell, chickweed, male fluellin, cat-mint, and clot-bur, [p. 44]; yarrow, and oak of Jerusalem, [p. 46]; pimpernel, and toadflax, [p. 48]; and wild purslain, and woad-waxen, [p. 51]. See also spearmint, and ground-ivy, [p. 89]; and elecampane, celandine, and tansy, [p. 90].
[262] The earliest, almost the only account that we have of the gardens of our fathers, after they had settled themselves in their New England, and had tamed its rugged coasts to obedience to English husbandry. What with their garden beans, and Indian beans, and pease (“as good as ever I eat in England,” says Higginson in 1629); their beets, parsnips, turnips, and carrots (“our turnips, parsnips, and carrots are both bigger and sweeter than is ordinary to be found in England,” says the same reverend writer); their cabbages and asparagus,—both thriving, we are told, exceedingly; their radishes and lettuce; their sorrel, parsley, chervil, and marigold, for pot-herbs; and their sage, thyme, savory of both kinds, clary, anise, fennel, coriander, spearmint, and pennyroyal, for sweet herbs,—not to mention the Indian pompions and melons and squanter-squashes, “and other odde fruits of the country,”—the first-named of which had got to be so well approved among the settlers, when Josselyn wrote in 1672, that what he calls “the ancient New-England standing dish” (we may well call it so now!) was made of them; and, finally, their pleasant, familiar flowers, lavender-cotton and hollyhocks and satin (“we call this herbe, in Norfolke, sattin,” says Gerard; “and, among our women, it is called honestie”) and gillyflowers, which meant pinks as well, and dear English roses, and eglantine,—yes, possibly, hedges of eglantine [(p. 90 note)],—surely the gardens of New England, fifty years after the settlement of the country, were as well stocked as they were a hundred and fifty years after. Nor were the first planters long behindhand in fruit. Even at his first visit, in 1639, our author was treated with “half a score very fair pippins,” from the Governor’s Island in Boston Harbor; though there was then, he says (Voyages, p. 29), “not one apple tree nor pear planted yet in no part of the countrey but upon that island.” But he has a much better account to give in 1671: “The quinces, cherries, damsons, set the dames a work. Marmalad and preserved damsons is to be met with in every house. Our fruit-trees prosper abundantly,—apple-trees, pear-trees, quince-trees, cherry-trees, plum-trees, barberry-trees. I have observed, with admiration, that the kernels sown, or the succors planted, produce as fair and good fruit, without graffing, as the tree from whence they were taken. The countrey is replenished with fair and large orchards. It was affirmed by one Mr. Woolcut (a magistrate in Connecticut Colony), at the Captain’s messe (of which I was), aboard the ship I came home in, that he made five hundred hogsheads of syder out of his own orchard in one year.”—Voyages, p. 189-90. Our barberry-bushes, now so familiar inhabitants of the hedgerows of Eastern New England, should seem from this to have come, with the eglantines, from the gardens of the first settlers. Barberries “are planted in most of our English gardens,” says Gerard.
[263] Portulaca oleracea,; L. β. sativa, L. (garden purslain). The wild variety is also reckoned by our author, in his list of plants, common to us and the Old World (p. 51).
[264] See Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 188.
[265] Vicia Faba, Willd., of which the Windsor bean is a variety. The author compares it, [at p. 56], with kidney-beans (Phaseolus vulgaris, L.), called Indian beans by the first settlers, who had them from the savages, to the advantage of the last-mentioned sort; which probably soon drove the other out of our gardens.—Compare Cobbett’s American Gardener, p. 105.
[266] Gerard, p. 75,—Avena nuda, L.; derived from common oats (A. sativa, L.) according to Link; and also (in Gerard’s time, and even later) in cultivation. It was called pillcorn, or peelcorn, because the grains, when ripe, drop naked from the husks. But is it not possible that our author’s Silpee (comparable with apee, a leaf; toopee, a root; ahpee, a bow, in the Micmac language,— Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi., pp. 20, 24) was really the American name of the well-known water-oats, or Canada rice,—Zizania aquatica, L.; the deciduous grains of which are said to afford “a very good meal” (Loudon, Encycl., p. 788), with the qualities of rice?—See Bigel., Fl. Bost., edit. 3, p. 369. This has long been used by our savages; but I have not met with any mention of it in the early writers. The “standing dish in New England” has its interest, if it were really made of Canada rice.
[267] Gerard, p. 680,—Mentha viridis, L. It perhaps soon became naturalized. “In moist ground” (1785).—Cutler, l. c.
[268] Perhaps only an inference of the author’s, from the southern origin of these three shrubs. Lavender also belongs naturally to a warmer climate.
[269] Gerard, p. 1109,—Santolina Chamæ Cyparissus, L.
[270] Gerard, p. 856,—Glechoma hederacea, L.; once of great medicinal repute: which accounts for our author’s finding it, as it should seem, among garden-herbs. It has become naturalized and very familiar in New England. Cutler finds it wild in 1785. Mr. Bentham refers it to Nepeta, but substitutes a new specific name for that given by Linnæus, which is based on the ancient names, and has at least the right of priority.
[271] “Gilliflowers thrive exceedingly there, and are very large. The collibuy, or humming-bird, is much pleased with them.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 188.
[272] Elecampane (Gerard, p. 793),—Inula Helenium, L. “Roadsides” (1785),—Cutler, l. c.; and now extensively naturalized in New England.
[273] Gerard, p. 1272,—Rosa rubiginosa, L.; and R. micrantha, Sm. Since naturalized, especially in Eastern New England, and not uncommon on roadsides and in pastures. First indicated as a member of our Flora by Bigelow in 1824.—Fl. Bost., in loc. “Eglantine, or sweet-bryer, is best sowen with juniper-berries,—two or three to one eglantine-berry, put into a hole made with a stick. The next year, separate and remove them to your banks. In three years’ time, they will make a hedge as high as a man; which you may keep thick and handsome with cutting.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 188. And what next goes before seems to show that the author picked up this information here; which is not uninteresting.
[275] Brier-rose, or hep-tree (Gerard, p. 1270); “also called Rosa canina, which is a plant so common and well knowne, that it were to small purpose to use many words in the description thereof: for even children with great delight eat the berries thereof, when they be ripe,—make chaines and other prettie gewgawes of the fruit; cookes and gentlewomen make tarts, and such like dishes, for pleasure thereof,” &c. (Gerard, l. c.). Rosa canina, L., was once the collective name of what are now understood as many distinct species; but that which still retains the name of dog-rose is reckoned the finest of native English roses. This familiar plant may well have been reared with tender interest in some New-England gardens of Josselyn’s day; but it did not make a new home here, like the eglantine. Cutler gives the name of dog-rose to the Carolina rose,—R. Carolina, L.,—which it has not kept; and he also makes it equivalent to the officinal R. canina. Our Flora will possibly one day include one or two other garden-roses. A damask rose is well established and spreading rapidly in mowing-land of the writer’s, and elsewhere on roadsides of this country; and that general favorite, the cinnamon-rose, which is now naturalized in England, may yet become wild with us.
[276] Great celandine (Gerard, p. 1069), as the west-country name of kenning-wort—that is, sight-wort—makes manifest; the juice being once thought to be “good to sharpen the sight,”—Chelidonium majus, L. Small celandine (Ranunculus Ficaria, L.) was quite another thing. The former had got to be “common by fences and amongst rubbish” in 1785 (Cutler, l. c.), and is now naturalized in Eastern New England.
[277] Gerard, p. 650,—Tanacetum vulgare, L. In “pastures” (1785).—Cutler, l. c. Now widely naturalized in New England.
[278] [See p. 57], note. “The ancient New-England standing dish” was doubtless far better than Gerard’s fried pompions (p. 921), and has more than held its own.
[279] “For such commodities as lie under ground, I cannot, out of mine own experience or knowledge, say much; having taken no great notice of such things: but it is certainly reported that there is iron-stone; and the Indians informed us that they can lead us to the mountains of black-lead; and have shown us lead-ore, if our small judgment in such things does not deceive us; and though nobody dare confidently conclude, yet dare they not utterly deny, but that the Spaniard’s-bliss may lie hid in the barren mountains. Such as have coasted the country affirm that they know where to fetch sea-coal, if wood were scarce. There is plenty of stone, both rough and smooth, useful for many things; with quarries of slate, out of which they get coverings for houses; with good clay, whereof they make tiles and bricks and pavements for their necessary uses. For the country it is well watered as any land under the sun; every family, or every two families, having a spring of sweet water betwixt them; which is far different from the waters of England, being not so sharp, but of a fatter substance, and of a more jetty colour.... Those that drink it be as healthful, fresh, and lusty as they that drink beer.”—Wood, New-Eng. Prospect, chap. v. “The humour and justness of” this writer’s “account recommend him,” says the editor of 1764, “to every candid mind.” There is certainly no view of New England, as it was at its settlement, that surpasses Wood’s in understanding, and homeborn English truth, not always without beauty. What he says in this place of “quarries of slate” points to a very early discovery. Higginson says, in 1629 (New-Eng. Plantation, l. c., p. 118), “Here is plenty of slates at the Isle of Slate in Masathulets Bay:” and there is a court order of July 2, 1633, granting “to Tho: Lambe, of slate in Slate Ileand, 10 poole towards the water-side, and 5 poole into the land, for three yeares; payeing the yearely rent of ijs. vjd.”—Mass. Col. Rec., vol. i. p. 106. There are other later grants of the same island, which “lies between Bumkin Island and Weymouth River.”—Pemberton, Desc. Bost., Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 297. Josselyn, in his Voyages, p. 46, says that tables of slate could be got out (he does not tell us where), “long enough for a dozen men to sit at.” Argillaceous slate is, according to Dr. Hitchcock, “the predominating rock on the outermost of these islands;” and he adds, that “there can be but little doubt that the peninsula of Boston has a foundation” of this rock.—Report on Geol. of Mass., p. 270.
[280] “Mr. John Winthrope, jun., is granted ye hill at Tantousq, about 60 miles westward, in which the black-leade is; and liberty to purchase some land there of the Indians” (13th November, 1644).—Mass. Col. Rec., vol. ii. p. 82; and Savage, in Winthrop, N. E., vol. ii. p. 213, note. The place mentioned is what is now Sturbridge; which is called “the most important locality” of black-lead in Massachusetts, by Dr. Hitchcock.—Geol., pp. 47, 395.
[281] “The mountains and rocky hills are richly furnished with mines of lead, silver, copper, tin, and divers sorts of minerals, branching out even to their summits; where, in small crannies, you may meet with threds of perfect silver: yet have the English no maw to open any of them;” and so forth.—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 44.
[282] Asterias rubens, L.—Gould, Report on Invert., p. 345.
[283] See the chapter on Fishes, p. 23, for this and the others here spoken of.
[284] “Numerous about the Isle of Sables; i.e., the Sandy Isle.”—Voyages, p. 106. “Mr. Graves” (year 1635) “in the ‘James,’ and Mr. Hodges in the ‘Rebecka,’ set sail for the Isle of Sable for sea-horse, which are there in great number,” &c.—Winthrop’s N. E., by Savage, vol. i. p. 162. And I cite one other mention of this pursuit: “Eastward is the Isle of Sables; whither one John Webb, alias Evered (an active man), with his company, are gone, with commission from the Bay to get sea-horse teeth and oyle.”—Lechford’s Newes from New England (1642), Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iii. 3d series, p. 100. The Magdalen Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are the most southern habitat of the animal spoken of by Godman.—Amer. Nat. Hist., vol. i. p. 249.
[285] Compare Cutler (Account of Indig. Veg., l. c., p. 456) and Wood and Bache (Dispens., p. 1369).
[286] The author has something to the same effect in his Voyages, p. 124; but Wood’s account of the Indian women (New-England’s Prospect, part ii. chap. xx.) is far better worth reading. Both appreciated, in one way or another, their savage neighbors. Wood has a pleasant touch at the last. “These women,” he says, “resort often to the English houses, where pares cum paribus congregatæ,—in sex, I mean,—they do somewhat ease their misery by complaining, and seldom part without a relief. If her husband come to seek for his squaw, and begin to bluster, the English woman betakes her to her arms, which are the war-like ladle and the scalding liquors, threatning blistering to the naked runaway, who is soon expelled by such liquid comminations. In a word, to conclude this woman’s history, their love to the English hath deserved no small esteem; ever presenting them something that is either rare or desired,—as strawberries, hurtleberries, rasberries, gooseberries, cherries, plumbs, fish, and other such gifts as their poor treasury yields them” (l. c.). And, if Lechford’s Newes from New England (l. supra c., p. 103) can be trusted, the savages became “much the kinder to their wives by the example of the English.”
[287] In the author’s Voyages, this chronological table is greatly extended; beginning with “Anno Mundi, 3720,” and ending with A.D. 1674.
[288] Set right by the author in Voyages, p. 248.
[289] The author, in the “chronological observations” appended to his Voyages, enlarges this, but confounds Conant’s Plantation at Cape Ann, and Endicott’s, as follows: “1628. Mr. John Endicot arrived in New England with some number of people, and set down first by Cape Ann, at a place called afterwards Gloster; but their abiding-place was at Salem, where they built the first town in the Massachusets Patent.... 1629. Three ships arrived at Salem, bringing a great number of passengers from England.... Mr. Endicot chosen Governour.” The next year, Josselyn continues as follows: “1630. The 10th of July, John Winthrop, Esq., and the Assistants, arrived in New England with the patent for the Massachusetts.... John Winthrop, Esq., chosen Governour for the remainder of the year; Mr. Thomas Dudley, Deputy-Governour; Mr. Simon Broadstreet, Secretary.”—Voyages, p. 252. The title of Governor was used anciently, as it still is elsewhere, in a looser sense than has been usual in New England; and derived all the dignity that it had from the character and considerableness of the government. Conant and Endicott were directors or governors of settlements in the Massachusetts Bay before Winthrop’s arrival; but when the Massachusetts Company in London proceeded, on the 20th October, 1629, to carry into effect their resolution to transfer their government to this country,—and chose accordingly Winthrop to be their Governor; Humphrey, their Deputy-Governor; and Endicot and others, Assistants (Young, Chron. of Mass., p. 102),—the record appears sufficient evidence that they had in view something quite different from the fishing plantation which Conant had had charge of at Cape Ann, or the little society (“in all, not much above fifty or sixty persons,” says White’s Relation in Young, Chron., p. 13; which the editor, from Higginson’s narrative, raises to “about a hundred”) “of which Master Endecott was sent out Governour” (White, l. c.) at Naumkeak.
[290] That is, Noddle’s Island was already planted on (by Mr. Maverick) when the government was established.—Compare Johnson, cited by Prince, N. E. Chronol., edit. 2, p. 308, note.
[291] The date set right in Prince, N. E. Chronol., p. 367.
[292] The date corrected in Prince, N. E. Chronol., edit. 2, p. 367.
[293] Compare Prince, p. 367, and Mass. Col. Rec., vol. i. p. 128. “The will,” says Dr. Mather, “because it bequeathed a thousand pounds to New England, gave satisfaction unto our Mr. Wilson; though it was otherwise injurious to himself.”—Magnalia, vol. iii. p. 45, cit. Davis, in Morton’s Memorial, p. 334, note.
[294] Compare Winthrop, N.E., vol. i. p. 265; Johnson’s Wonder-working Prov. lib. ii. c. 12, cit. Savage; and Morton’s Memorial, by Davis, p. 209, and note, p. 289.
[295] Morton’s Memorial, by Davis, p. 244.
[296] 1664, “December, a great and dreadful comet, or blazing star, appeared in the south-east in New England for the space of three moneths; which was accompanied with many sad effects,—great mildews blasting in the countrey the next summer.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, Chronol. Obs., p. 273; and see p. 245 of the same for a fuller account.—Compare Morton’s Memorial, by Davis, p. 304. As to the blasting and mildew of 1665, see the same, p. 317; and that of 1664, p. 309.
[297] See Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 204 and p. 277, where the “hole” is said to have been, not “two,” but “forty, yards square:” and we are farther told that “the like accident fell out at Casco, one and twenty miles from it to the eastward, much about the same time; and fish, in some ponds in the countrey, thrown up dead upon the banks,—supposed likewise to be kill’d with mineral vapours.” Hubbard (Hist. N.E., chap. 75) tells this, partly in the same words with the account in the Voyages, and adds, “All the whole town of Wells are witnesses of the truth of this relation; and many others have seen sundry of these clay pellets, which the inhabitants have shown to their neighbours of other towns.” And compare also the following, at p. 189 of the Voyages: “In 1669, the pond that lyeth between Watertown and Cambridge cast its fish dead upon the shore; forc’t by a mineral vapour, as was conjectured.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Footnote [54] is referenced twice from [page 53].
Footnote [143] is referenced four times from [page 88].
Footnote [144] is referenced twice from page [88].
Footnote [153] is referenced twice from page [91].
Footnote [160] is referenced twice from page [92].
Footnote [177] is referenced twice from page [96].
Footnote [291] is referenced three times from page [162].
A few minor typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.
Hyphenation is inconsistent in this book but has not been changed.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been preserved.
Introduction:
[Pg 24]: ‘the Linnean system’ replaced by ‘the Linnæan system’.
Title page:
[Pg 29]: ‘Ilustrated with CUTS’ replaced by ‘Illustrated with CUTS’.
Errors likely introduced in this 1865 printing:
[Pg 76]: ‘upon their breeeh’ replaced by ‘upon their breech’.
[Pg 79]: ‘are common liewise’ replaced by ‘are common likewise’.
[Pg 115]: ‘two or three Fadom’ replaced by ‘two or three Fathom’.
Changes made to the inserted original page numbering {}:
[Pg 46]: ‘nor Mag{12}pies’ replaced by ‘nor Mag{13}pies’.
[Pg 125]: Missing {71} inserted before the Illustration.
[Pg 137]: Missing {85} inserted before ‘4. Of such plants ...’.
[Pg 156]: Missing {99} inserted before the Illustration.