80 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON. 



esting observations upon Indians and general natural history. He 

 it was who, in 1694, carried to England a female opossum, which 

 lurnished the materials for the first dissertation upon the anatomy 

 of the marsupiates.* 



One of the most eminent of our colonial naturalists was Dr. 

 Alexander Garden, born in Scotland about 1728 [d. I79 1 ]- ^ e 

 emigrated to America about 1750, and practised medicine in 

 Charleston, S. C, until after the close of the revolutionary war, 

 when he returned to England and became very prominent in 

 scientific and literary circles, and vice-president of the Royal 

 Society in 1783. He was an excellent botanist, but did his 

 best work upon fishes and reptiles. He sent large collections of 

 fishes to Linnanis, which were so well prepared that when I 

 examined the fishes in the Linnasan collection in London, in 1883, 

 I found nearly every specimen referred to by him in his letters in 

 excellent condition, though few collected by others were identifi- 

 able. Garden was the discoverer of AmpJiiitma means, and was 

 instrumental in first sending the electrical eel to Europe. His 

 letters to Linnaeus and to Ellis are voluminous and abound in val- 

 uable information. In 1764 he published a description of Spigc- 

 lia marilandica, with an account of its medicinal properties. 



James Logan, [b. 1664, d. 1 75 1 ]] , a native of Ireland and 

 member of the Society of Friends, accompanied William Penn 

 to this country in 1682 in the capacity of secretary, and became a 

 public man of prominence, serving for two years as governor of 

 the colony of Pennsylvania. He was a man of broad culture and 

 was the author of a translation of Cicero's " De Senectute," 

 printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1744. To Logan belongs the 

 honor of having carried on the first American investigations in 

 phvsiological botany, the results of which were published in 

 Leyden, in 1739, in an essay entitled " Experimenta et Melete- 

 mata de Plantarum Generationis." This essay, which related to 



* Edward Tyson : Carigueya sen Marsufiialis, or the Anatomy of an 

 Opossum, &c, Sic. < Phil. Trans., xx, i6q8, p. 105. 



