THE FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA 5™ 



first and foremost a botanist from choice, he was a chemist by pro- 

 fession, and managed to work at his beloved plants in the hours not 

 spent in an assaying office or in teaching chemistry to the students 

 of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. His work on the American 

 flora was perhaps the most critical that has ever been done, and when 

 we consider the meager materials known in his period, we are pro- 

 foundly impressed with his wonderful breadth of mind and the 

 accuracy of his knowledge. So well was Torrey known in 1831 that 

 Asa Gray, just through with his medical studies in central New York, 

 sought out Torrey at New York and commenced his apprenticeship in 

 botany under a master mind. What Gray afterwards became in 

 American botany he owed in large measure to the start given him by 

 John Torrey, a fact Gray himself was not slow to admit, and the 

 friendship of the two men never ceased. Torrey provided Gray a 

 curator's post in the old Lyceum of Natural History in order that he 

 might have the means to carry on his studies; he gave him the 

 encouragement of a father, as well as of an instructor; and he finally 

 associated Gray with himself in the preparation of the first great Flora 

 of North America, a fact that gave Gray at once a name and a stand- 

 ing among botanists abroad. The study on the flora early brought to 

 light the necessity of examining the types of American plants pre- 

 served in the collections of Europe, and Torrey, unable to make many 

 visits himself, made it possible for Gray to do this and thus come into 

 personal contact with the older generation of botanical spirits of the 

 old world. The call from Harvard came to Gray in 1843 and closed 

 the combined work of Torrey and Gray on the ' Flora of North 

 America.' Changes in our national history, to which I shall allude 

 later, shifted for a time the studies on the American flora, and before 

 the further publication of the work was possible, Torrey had passed 

 to his last sleep. Gray built up at Gambridge the herbarium and 

 garden that bear his name, and after Torrey's death continued his 

 publication of the ' Synoptical Flora,' but the work was left unfinished 

 when Gray died in 1888. 



Contemporary with Torrey in his early days were two botanists we 

 need to mention. One was Stephen Elliott, who published a sketch 

 of the botany of Georgia in 1816-1824 and who may be fairly con- 

 sidered the father of southern botany. Elliott's successor was Dr. A. 

 W. Chapman, who published three editions of the Flora of the Southern 

 States before his death, and Chapman's successor has recently given us 

 an enlarged Flora of the same region. The other contemporary of 

 Dr. Torrey was French in ancestry, a Turk by birth, a Sicilian by 

 adoption, and a vagabond by nature, gifted, versatile, wildly enthusi- 

 astic, erratic, much maligned and never understood either by his con- 

 temporaries or by his biographers. His name was Eafinesque, which 



