BOTANY AT ST. LOUIS 57 



Nuttall remained for two months collecting plants and sea shells upon 

 the different islands. He then separated from his companion and 

 sailed for California. He spent most of the spring and summer upon 

 the Pacific coast and then returned to the Sandwich Islands, where he 

 embarked upon the same vessel that Dana was serving his " Two 

 Years Before the Mast," to come home by way of Cape Horn. He 

 arrived at Philadelphia in October, 1835, and settled down to study 

 his treasures. For several years he worked thus and published two 

 important memoirs. At Christmas, 1841, Nuttall went back to Eng- 

 land, where he resided the last seventeen vears of his life. This 

 was not from choice, but because of the conditions under which an es- 

 tate was left to him by his uncle, requiring him to live in England 

 nine months of the year. He used his ample grounds for growing 

 rare plants. Just previously to leaving the United States he wrote 

 a supplement to Michaux's " Sylva." In the preface his wanderings 

 were outlined. He returned to America but once, when he took the 

 last three months of 1847 and the first three months of 1848. At 

 this time he studied the plants brought by Gamble from the Eocky 

 Mountains and Upper California, and published a paper upon them. 

 His death occurred on September 10, 1859, resulting from overstrain- 

 ing himself in opening a box of plants. 



Torrey and Gray dedicated a genus of the Eosaceae Nuttallia, to 

 this prince of scientists. 



Henry Shaw has honored him by placing a small obelisk of granite 

 near the north end of the museum building in the Missouri Botanical 

 Garden, with the following inscriptions : on the north side, " In Hon- 

 our of American Science," and on the south side, " To the Memory of 

 Thomas Nuttall, born in England 1786 and died September, 1859. 

 Honour to him the zealous and successful naturalist, the father of 

 western American botany, the worthy compeer of Barton, Michaux, 

 Hooker, Torrey, Gray and Engelmann." He also placed over the en- 

 trance of the main greenhouse in the Garden three busts : that of 

 Linnaeus in the middle, and those of Nuttall and Gray on either side. 



Although Nuttall explored the Missouri country on two different 

 occasions and worked in Arkansas, he seems never to have published 

 any considerable list of plants found by himself near St. Louis. 



[To be continued) 



