262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and causes of the deviations from the ordinary conformation of plants 

 than does that of Moquin." 



Engelmann spent a part of 1832 in Paris, in the study of medicine 

 and science, along with Braun and Agassiz. Some of his relatives 

 had determined to make investments in land in the Mississippi Val- 

 ley, and one of them had settled in Illinois, near St. Louis. The 

 others invited him to visit the country, as an agent for them, and he 

 accepted the proposition, being moved to do so, one of his biographers 

 suggests, by the expectation of finding in America an interesting field 

 of botanical research. He sailed from Bremen in September, 1832, 

 landed in Baltimore, after a voyage of six weeks, visited Philadelphia, 

 where he made the acquaintance of the botanist Nuttall, and arrived 

 at a friend's farm in Missouri in the middle of the ensuing winter. He 

 resided on the farm of his uncle Fritz, near Belleville, Illinois, till the 

 spring of 1835, when he undertook a horseback-journey through 

 Southwestern Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, down to Louisiana. 

 After nearly dying of fever during the summer in the swamps of 

 Arkansas, he returned to St. Louis, then a frontier town of eight 

 thousand inhabitants, and began the practice of medicine there in 

 December. He combined with his medical practice, which was very 

 successful, and became so extensive as to make him one of the leading 

 physicians of St. Louis, botanical investigations as a side pursuit. He 

 made collections which he sent, with his own scientific descriptions, 

 to the European museums, and also for his own herbarium. It was 

 through one of h is herbariums, which Dr. Gray examined in Berlin, 

 that that botanist became acquainted with Dr. Engelmann's studies ; 

 and when the latter passed through New York on his return from his 

 marriage-journey to Kreuznach, in 1840, Dr. Gray embraced the oppor- 

 tunity of making his acquaintance, and formed with him a life-long 

 friendship. 



Dr. Engelmann made a second botanical excursion south, to Ar- 

 kansas in 1837. His first botanical work, " A Monography of North 

 American Cuscutinea^," or dodders, was published in 1842, in the 

 " American Journal of Science," and made him known throughout the 

 scientific world. Till this time only one species of dodder indigenous 

 to the United States was known. Engelmann's monograph treated of 

 fourteen species, all found within the Mississippi Valley, or east of it. 

 A more systematic treatise, published in the " Transactions of the 

 St. Louis Academy of Sciences," in 1859, after investigation of the 

 whole genus in America and Europe, gave the characteristics of sev- 

 enty-seven species. 



The botanical chapter in the report of Colonel Doniphan's expe- 

 dition of 1846 and 1847 to New Mexico, published by the Government 

 in 1848, was prepared by Dr. Engelmann from material furnished by 

 Dr. Wislizenus, his colleague in the medical profession, who was a 

 member of the expedition. 



