22G Rhodora [November 



Botanists, 22 (1893), give the following: " Brickell, John (fl. 1730- 

 1745). M. D. 'Nat Hist. N. Carolina,' Dublin, 1737. Cat. Ameri- 

 can plants and trees, Dublin, 1745. Sent plants to Muhlenberg. 

 Elliott, Bot. Carolina, ii. 290. Brickcllia Ell." 



In the Catalogue of the Library of the Arnold Arboretum, i. Ill 

 (1914), occurs the following: 



Brickell, John. Jeffersonia [New York. 1800.] 



Medical repository, 1800. i. 556. 

 The natural history of North-Carolina, with an account of the trade, 



manners, and customs of the Christian and Indian inhabitants. Dublin. 



1737. am. 8°. pp. [4], xvi, 408. Map and 4 plates. 



"Of the vegetables of North Carolina," pp. 57-106. 



Stellandria [and] Stellandria glabra. [New York. 1803.] 8°. 



Medical repository, 1803, vi, 327. 



The fact that must strike anyone who attentively examines these 

 records is that they attribute to Dr. John Brickell an extraordinarily 

 long period of activity. It is true the date 1837 given by Wittstein is 

 merely a clerical or typographical error, for the Natural History of 

 North Carolina by Brickell was published a hundred years earlier. 

 It passed through several editions, or rather reprints, one in 1737, 

 one, it is said, in 1739, another in 1743, and according to Watt in the 

 Bibliotheca Britannica and to Allibone in his Critical Dictionary of 

 English Literature, i. 244, the earliest in 1723. However, a man who 

 could prepare for publication such a work even as early as 1737 (not 

 to mention 1723 — a date open to suspicion of error) was certainly 

 not likely to be writing for the Medical Repository in 1803. Nor 

 would a man who, according to Britten & Boulger, flourished in 1730- 

 45, be likely to have been a correspondent of Muhlenberg and Stephen 

 Elliott, who "flourished" at least a generation later. 



Suspecting that two men of the same name and profession, though 

 of very different epochs, had been confused by the authors quoted, 

 the writer made such search for precise records as time and opportunity 

 permitted. It soon became clear that the Dr. John Brickell of 

 Savannah in the time of Elliott was a physician and botanist of more 

 than local reputation, who was among the original subscribers to the 

 Medical Repository and who contributed to that journal the following 

 articles : 



1) A communication of three paragraphs, hexade 1, vol. i. 573 

 (1798), describing as a new genus, under the name of Jeffersonia, the 

 yellow jasmine of the southern states, apparently without knowledge 



