[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.