IRbofcora 



JOURNAL OF 



THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 



Vol. 23. June, 1921. No. 270. 



OLD-TIME CONNECTICUT BOTANISTS AND THEIR 

 HERBARIA— II. 

 C. A. Weatherby. 



Joseph Barratt — Biographical information about Barratt is not 

 altogether easy to come by. He died an old man, poor and with 

 no near relatives within reach. His effects were mostly handed over 

 to his landlord to satisfy a debt and were sold or destroyed as they 

 appeared to have value or not. All that remains Qf his personal 

 papers are a few odd slips on which he was accustomed to jot down 

 accounts of any events which seemed to him of especial interest, and 

 a small note-book into which he copied some of these slips, together 

 with a table of dates. From these, from a series of his letters to Dr. 

 Torrey during the years 1827 to 1846, now preserved at the New 

 York Botanical Garden, from references to him in botanical works 

 of his contemporaries and from the local newspapers of his time, 

 it is possible to patch together some outline of his life and to gain 

 some notion of what manner of man he was. 



The figure which results has about it a certain air of failure. He 

 had, one feels, an opportunity. He was a man of real learning, 

 good natural powers of observation and large enthusiasm and indus- 

 try and had the impulse and desire for original work. He gathered an 

 excellent ibrary, and was the acquaintance or correspondent of some 

 of the best botanists of his time. He lived in a region of consider- 

 able botanical interest, then practically unexplored. He ought, it 

 seems, to have been, if not a Muhlenberg or a Torrey, at least another 

 Darlingtcn or Bigelow. In geology, his chance was as good. Yet 

 he is remembered today by the older residents of Middletown as a 

 rather amusing eccentric who was wont to go clambering about the 



