Riverside, Cambridge:
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
PUBLISHER’S PREFACE.
The work published by Josselyn in 1672, entitled “New England’s Rarities discovered,” which has been reprinted in a similar form, and as a companion volume to the present, contains a full and detailed account of the family of the author, with many curious facts relating to the personal history of this early explorer of New England; but it has been thought expedient to prefix to his narrative a genealogical chart of the family, copied from a paper among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, the substance of which has been printed in the “New England Historical and Genealogical Register,” and which is now kindly furnished for publication by Samuel G. Drake, Esq. The table now published will be found generally to confirm the information given in the account of the family already published.
The first of the “Two Voyages” of Josselyn, of which he gives an account in the present work, was undertaken in the year 1638, only eight years after the settlement of Boston, and when, to use his own words, “it was rather a village than a town, there being not above twenty or thirty houses;” while the second visit of the author to New England took place in 1663, after an absence of twenty-five years, and when the town had assumed the proportions of a flourishing seaport. On this occasion he appears to have remained in New England for eight years, the principal part of which was spent on the plantation of his brother, Henry Josselyn, at Black Point.
This work is the latest of the author’s productions, and was not given to the public until 1674. It was reprinted by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1833, and may be found in the third volume of the third series of their collections. Josselyn’s observations on the natural history of the country, his descriptions of the various plants and notices of their medicinal effects, are more full and exact in the present work than in the “New England’s Rarities,” printed two years earlier, and must be considered as among the most valuable of those given by the early botanists of New England.