84 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



the first botanical work which was entirely American. Darling 

 ton's li Memorials of Bartram and Marshall " is a worthy tribute 

 to this useful man. 



Moses Bartram, a nephew of John, was also a botanist, and 

 William, his son, [b. 1739, d. 1823], was a much more prominent 

 figure in American science. His ''Travels through North and 

 South Carolina," published in 1791, was, in the opinion of 

 Coues, the starting-point of a distinctively American school of 

 ornithology. 



Collinson was a correspondent of Benjamin Franklin, and is 

 said not only to have procured and sent to him the first eler 

 trical machine which came to America, but to have made known 

 to him in 1743 the results of the first experiments in electricity, 

 the continuation of which gave to Franklin his European repu 

 tation as a man of science. Collinson was instrumental in in 

 troducing grape culture in Virginia, and in acclimating here 

 many foreign ornamental shrubs. 



Ellis was a more eminent man of science, and his name is 

 associated with the beginnings of modern marine zoology. 



Linnaeus wrote to him in 1769: ' Your discoveries may be 

 said to vie with those of Columbus. He found out America, 

 or a new India, in the West; you have laid open hitherto 

 unknown Indies in the depths of the ocean." He was royal 

 agent for West Florida, and had extraordinary facilities for 

 obtaining specimens from the colonies. 



His nephew, Henry Ellis, F. R. S., [b. 1720, cl. 1805], was the 

 author of " A Voyage to Hudson's Bay in 1746 and 1747 for discov 

 ering a Northwest Passage," which contains some valuable 

 notes upon zoology. He was in 1756 appointed governor of 

 the colony of Georgia, and in 1758 published in the Philo 

 sophical Transactions an essay on k ' The Heat of the Weather 

 in Georgia." In 1760 he made a voyage for the discovery 

 of a new passage to the Pacific, and later w r as governor of 

 Nova Scotia, where we can but believe he continued his ob- 



