510 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the first to give instruction in botany, in the intervals when he was 

 not in congress or the senate of the United States. After some strug- 

 gles David Hosack, his successor as professor in the Medical College, 

 secured the establishment of the Elgin Botanical Gardens in this 

 city by aid from the state of New York. These gardens were located 

 on the square bounded by Madison and Fifth Avenues and Fifty-first 

 and Fifty-second Streets, and although south of the lower end of what is 

 now Central Park, they were too remote from the New York city of 

 a century ago to be much visited by the public, and with the pressure 

 of other duties that came to Hosack they soon went into a decline, and 

 the state finally turned them over to Columbia College, first, to man- 

 age as a botanical garden and, finally, as this proved a white elephant, 

 to use for whatever purpose they chose. With strange prescience, the 

 college authorities held to their trust, though at times it was a financial 

 burden, and now this same Elgin Botanical Garden, once so worthless, 

 has become one of the foundations of a university's wealth. A fitting 

 memorial to Hosack may be seen in the two ancient yew trees that once 

 stood in the Elgin Gardens, but now flank the approaches to the library 

 of Columbia University. 



But Hosack was more than a mere enthusiast over botanical 

 gardens. He had the gift of enthusing others, and among these was 

 a young lawyer with the large jaw so characteristic of the profession, 

 who afterwards became a teacher and finally went to Williams College. 

 Here he spread the contagion for botanical study, and his students 

 became so enthusiastic over the subject that they volunteered to 

 publish his lectures in a book which became the first of a series of 

 eight editions of the manuals of botany that appeared as precursors of 

 Gray's series of a later period. Amos Eaton owed his success to his 

 large jaw — what has sometimes been called the ' oratorical jaw ' — that 

 first impelled him to enter the law. Not alone in botany, but in 

 geology, were his auditors most enthusiastic over his lectures, and 

 one of the state legislatures in joint session invited him to repeat one 

 course before their body. Eaton was perhaps saved from the law 

 for a higher mission through the force of the law itself. For the 

 supposed mismanagement of an estate in Columbia county, he was for 

 a time placed in a debtor's prison in New York city. During his 

 confinement there he amused himself by interesting the bright twelve- 

 year-old son of the prison warden in the study of plants. Here Eaton 

 unconsciously did his greatest work in botany, for the seed, so fortui- 

 tously planted, took hold of that twelve-year-old boy and in later 

 years he was known as the Nestor of American botany — John Torrey. 

 But in those early days botany had few emoluments and no endowed 

 chairs. The time for botanical work must be stolen from his recrea- 

 tion hours when not active in his profession, so that while Torrey was 



