[113] Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a French botanist of considerable reputation in his day, was born at Aix, Provence, in 1656 and died in 1708. He was educated by the Jesuits for a priest but following a natural inclination he later became a botanist. In 1683 he became professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. While occupying this position he made trips through western Europe, Greece and Asia Minor. His principal work, and the one quoted here, is Institutiones Rei Herbariae in three volumes, published in Paris in 1700. He was one of the most prominent systematic botanists who preceded Linnaeus.
[114] Humphrey Marshall was born in the town of West Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1722, of Quaker parents. He was a cousin of John Bartram, their mothers being sisters. Like Bartram, he had few opportunities for education, not going to school after he was twelve years of age. He was a stone-mason by trade, studying botany in his leisure moments. In 1773 he started a botanic garden at Marshallton. In 1785 he published Arbustrum Americanum, The American Grove, or An Alphabetical Catalog of Forest Trees and Shrubs, Natives of the American United States. This work had been in preparation about five years previous to its publication. It is said to be the first botanical work of a native American. Marshall died in 1801.
[115] But little is known of the life of Thomas Walter. He was a native of Hampshire, England, and migrated to St. John’s Parish, South Carolina, where he had a plantation on the Santee River. Here he died in 1788 at about the age of forty-eight years. His only publication of note is the Flora Caroliniana, published in the year of his death. He must have been in correspondence with European botanists of that time as his herbarium is preserved in the British Museum.
[116] Grapes are not to-day considered dioecious but polygamo-dioecious, a distinction which will be defined later.
[117] John Bartram was born near the village of Darby in Delaware (then Chester) County, Pennsylvania, in 1699. Bartram is generally credited with having established the first botanical garden in America. This garden was founded about 1728, some four miles south of what was the town of Philadelphia and is now a part of the Park System of that city. He was bred a Quaker but owing to his liberal opinions was excluded from that Society in 1758. During his life he was in correspondence with many of the leading scientific men of Europe to whom he sent many specimens of plants and other things of scientific interest. He made many trips into various parts of the colonies, to Ontario, Lake George, the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia, in search of information. The last of these journeys, that to the southern states, was made after he was seventy years of age. Bartram is blamed by all of his contemporaries for not having published more than he did. His death occurred in 1777.
William Bartram, son of John Bartram, was born in 1739 and died in 1823. Much of his work was done in connection with his father under whom he received his botanical training. His best known work is his Travels in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida (1791), in which he gives an interesting account of that region, including descriptions of a number of new southern plants. His article on grapes which is here quoted was published in the Domestic Encyclopedia, 1804, and also in the Medical Repository of the same year.
[118] Thomas Nuttall was born in Settle in Yorkshire, England, in 1786. He migrated to the United States in 1807, making his home in Philadelphia where he became acquainted with William Bartram and Dr. Barton. It was largely owing to the influence of these men that he turned his attention to botany. Nuttall was an extensive traveler and made botanical expeditions into many parts of the country. He explored the Middle West up to the Rocky Mountains and made a trip around the Horn to California. From 1825 to 1834 he was connected with Harvard College. In 1842 he was called to England by a bequest from an uncle left to him conditional on his residing for nine months of each year in England; compliance with this request caused a cessation of his botanical work in America. He died at Nutgrove, Lancashire, in 1859. Nuttall’s first and probably greatest work was his Genera of North American Plants and Catalogue of the Species, published in 1818. Besides various accounts of his expeditions he made an addition of three volumes to Michaux’s Sylva bringing that work up to six volumes.
[119] Constantine Samuel Rafinesque was born in Galata, a suburb of Constantinople in European Turkey, in 1783. He was of French-German descent, his father being a French merchant of Marseilles, and his mother of Saxon parentage. In 1802 he came to Philadelphia. While here he was busied with mercantile pursuits, occupying a position as clerk, but studied botany out of office hours for amusement. In 1805 he went to Sicily where he spent the next ten years. Here he commenced the extensive series of publications which have made his name so well known to scientists. In 1815 he returned to the United States, traveling about from place to place for some time and finally settling in Lexington, Kentucky, where he became a professor in Transylvania University. He left Lexington in 1825, removing to Philadelphia, where he spent the remainder of his life, dying in poverty in 1840. Rafinesque’s biographer gives 420 differently titled articles on nearly all scientific subjects as the product of his pen. His monograph on grapes, entitled American Manual of the Grape Vine and The Art of Making Wines, etc., was published in Philadelphia in 1830.
[120] Mo. Ent. Rpt., 1874:71.
[121] Bush. Cat., 1883:9.