John Robin—“second to none,” says Tournefort, “in the knowledge and cultivation of plants”—was placed in charge of the Royal Botanical Garden at Paris, about the year 1570; and Vespasian Robin, “a most diligent botanist,” followed, in similar connection[12] with the larger garden founded by Lewis the Thirteenth. Both are said to have assisted the writer whose book we are to notice; but especially the latter,[13] who, there is little doubt, deserves credit for all the American species described in it.
The history of Canadian and other new plants—“Canadensium Plantarum, aliarumque nondum editarum Historia” of Jacobus Cornuti, Doctor of Medicine, of Paris—was printed in that city (pp. 238) in 1635, under the patronage just mentioned; and contains accounts, accompanied, in every case but one, with figures on copper, of thirty-seven of our plants; of which the meadow-rue is known to botanists as Thalictrum Cornuti; and the common milkweed, as Asclepias Cornuti. Though himself not eminent as a botanist,[14] the work of Cornuti was valuable for its elegant presentation of much that was new; and it will always deserve honorable remembrance in the history of our Flora. There are several passages of it—as at pp. 5 and 7, and in the account of the two baneberries at p. 76, where we read, “Opacis et sylvestribus locis in eadem Americæ parte frequentissimum est geminum genus”—which look a little like a proper botanical collector’s notes on his specimens; and these specimens, and the others from the same region, may well have been results of the herborizing of that worthy Franciscan missionary, whose early observations on the natural history of Canada have been mentioned already above. Nor were the North-American plants possessed by Cornuti entirely confined to this region; for he speaks at the end (p. 214) of his having received a root, ex notha Anglia, as he strangely calls it, known, it appears, by the name of Serpentaria, or, in the vernacular, Snaqroel,—a sure remedy for the bite of a huge and most pernicious serpent in notha Anglia,—which was no doubt the snake-root so famous once as a cure for the bite of a rattlesnake, and one of the numerous varieties of Nabalus albus (L.) Hook., if not, as Pursh supposed, what is now the var. Serpentaria, Gray. But some view of the scantiness of scientific knowledge of our Flora, near forty years after Cornuti, may be had by reckoning the number of species for which Bauhin’s “Pinax” and “Prodromus” (1671) are cited by Linnæus in the “Species Plantarum.” Most of them are Southern plants; and the few decidedly Northern ones which meet us—as Cornus canadensis, Uvularia perfoliata, Trillium erectum, Arum triphyllum, and Adiantum pedatum—are all indicated, by Bauhin’s phrase, as from Brazil!
We have nothing illustrating the Flora of New England from Cornuti till Josselyn. In Virginia, Mr. John Banister, a correspondent of Ray’s, began to botanize probably not long after the middle of the seventeenth century. He was succeeded by several eminent names; as Mark Catesby, F.R.S. (born 1679), John Clayton, Esq. (born 1685), and John Mitchell, M.D., F.R.S.,—a contemporary of the other two,—who together gave to the botany of Virginia a distinguished lustre; as did Cadwalader Colden, Esq. (born 1688),—a selection from whose correspondence has been lately edited by Dr. Gray,—to that of New York; John Bartram (born 1701), “American botanist to his Britannic Majesty,” to that of Pennsylvania; and, somewhat later, Alexander Garden, M.D., F.R.S. (born 1728), to that of South Carolina. Josselyn himself is, indeed, little more than a herbalist; but it is enough that he gets beyond that entirely unscientific character. He certainly botanized, and made botanical use of Gerard and his other authorities. The credit belongs to him of indicating several genera as new which were so, and peculiar to the American Flora. It may at least be said, that, at the time he wrote, there is no reason to suppose that any other person knew as much as he did of the botany of New England. “The plants in New England,” he says in his “Voyages,” p. 59, “for the variety, number, beauty, and virtues, may stand in competition with the plants of any countrey in Europe. Johnson hath added to Gerard’s ‘Herbal’ three hundred, and Parkinson mentioneth many more. Had they been in New England, they might have found a thousand, at least, never heard of nor seen by any Englishman before.”[15] Nor did our author fail to adorn his “Rarities” with recognizable figures, as well as descriptions, of some of these new American plants; and his arrangement is also creditable to his botanical knowledge. By this arrangement, his collections are distinguished into—
1. “Such plants as are common with us in England.”
2. “Such plants as are proper to the country.”
3. “Such plants as are proper to the country, and have no name.”
4. “Such plants as have sprung up since the English planted and kept cattle in New England.”
The last of these divisions is the most valuable part of Josselyn’s account, as it affords the only testimony that there is to the first notice among us of a number of now naturalized weeds, which it is an interesting question to separate from the more important class of plants truly indigenous in, and common to, both hemispheres; and the author’s treatment of the latter—as indeed of the other two lists mentioned above—shows that he was competent, in a measure, to reckon the former. This furnishes a date, and an early one; and there is no other till 1785, when Dr. Manasseh Cutler’s Memoir, to be spoken of, enables us to limit the appearance of some other species not mentioned by Josselyn.
There is no work of any size or importance on New-England plants, after Josselyn, for the whole century which followed. We were not, indeed, without men in distinguished connection with the European scientific world. The most eminent New-England family gained honors in science, as well as in the conduct of affairs. John Winthrop the younger, eldest son of the first Governor of Massachusetts,—and the “heir,” says Savage, “of all his father’s talents, prudence, and virtues, with a superior share of human learning,”[16]—was himself the first Governor of Connecticut, and had, in this connection, a certain scientific position and reputation. “The great Mr. Boyle, Bishop Wilkins, with several other learned men,” says Dr. Eliot, “had proposed to leave England, and establish a society for promoting natural knowledge in the new colony of which Mr. Winthrop, their intimate friend and associate, was appointed Governor. Such men were too valuable to lose from Great Britain; and, Charles II. having taken them under his protection, the society was there established, and obtained the title of the Royal Society of London.... Mr. Winthrop sent over many specimens of the productions of this country, with his remarks upon them: ‘and, by an order of the Royal Society, he was in a particular manner invited to take upon himself the charge of being the chief correspondent in the West, as Sir Philiberto Vernatti was in the East Indies.’ ‘His name,’ says the same writer, Dr. Cromwell Mortimer, Secretary of the Royal Society, in his flattering dedication of the fortieth volume of the Philosophical Transactions to the Governor’s grandson, ‘had he put it to his writings, would have been as universally known as the Boyles’s, the Wilkins’s, and Oldenburghs’, and been handed down to us with similar applause.’”[17] There is, in the volume of Philosophical Transactions for 1670, “An Extract of a Letter written by John Winthrop, Esq., Governor of Connecticut in New England, to the Publisher, concerning some Natural Curiosities of those Parts; especially a very strange and curiously-contrived Fish, sent for the Repository of the Royal Society” (pp. 3); in which are mentioned, as sent, specimens of scrub-oak; “bark of tree with fir-balsam, which grows in Nova Scotia, and, as I hear, in the more easterly part of New England;” pods of milk-weed, “used to stuff pillows and cushions;” and “a branch of the tree called the cotton-tree, bearing a kind of down, which also is not fit to spin.”
Fitz John Winthrop, Esq., F.R.S. (died 1707), son of the last, and also Governor of Connecticut, is said to have been “famous for his philosophical” (that is, scientific) “knowledge.”[18] And the second Governor’s nephew, John Winthrop, Esq., F.R.S. (died 1747), who left this country and passed the latter part of his life in England, is declared by the author of the dedication already above cited, to have “increased the riches of their” (the Royal Society’s) “repository with more than six hundred curious specimens, chiefly in the mineral kingdom; accompanied with an accurate account of each particular.” “Since Mr. Colwell,” it is added, “the founder of the Museum of the Royal Society, you have been the benefactor who has given the most numerous collection.” Dr. John Winthrop, F.R.S. (died 1779), Hollisian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, N.E., whose important papers on astronomical and other related phenomena are to be found in the Philosophical Transactions, was of another line of the same family.
Paul Dudley, Esq., F.R.S. (born 1675), son of Gov. Joseph Dudley, and himself Chief Justice of Massachusetts, was author of several papers in the Philosophical Transactions; one of which is an “Account of the Poison-wood Tree in New-England” (vol. xxxi. p. 135); and another, “Observations on some Plants in New-England, with Remarkable Instances of the Nature and Power of Vegetation” (vol. xxxiii. p. 129). This last is of only seven pages, and of little scientific account: though we learn from it, that, in 1726, when Mr. Dudley wrote, the Pearmain, Kentish Pippin, and Golden Russetin, were esteemed apples here, and the Orange and Bergamot cultivated pears;[19] that, in one town in 1721, they made three thousand, and in another near ten thousand barrels of cider; and that, to speak of “trees of the wood,” he knew of a button-wood tree which measured nine yards in girth, and made twenty-two cords of wood; and of an ash, which, at a yard from the ground, was fourteen feet eight inches in girth. He also expresses an intention to treat separately the evergreens of New England; and this treatise, which was possibly more valuable than the one just noticed, was in the possession of Peter Collinson, the eminent patron of horticulture, and was given by him to J. F. Gronovius; but has not, that I am aware of, appeared in print.[20]
It is likely that the early physicians of New England gave special attention to those simples of the country, the virtues of which were known to the savages; and perhaps it was partly in this way that the Rev. Jared Eliot (born 1685), minister of Killingworth in Connecticut,—who is called by Dr. Allen “the first physician of his day,”—is also designated, both by him and by Eliot, a botanist; and by the latter, “the first in New England.” There is no doubt he was a friend of Dr. Franklin’s, and a scientific agriculturist according to the knowledge of his day; and he is said to have introduced the white mulberry into Connecticut.[21] His Agricultural Essays went through more than one edition, but is now rare. Mr. Eliot died while our next character, the first native New-England botanist who deserves the name, was a student of Yale College.