16 BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTOX. 



that American zoology took its rise, and was fostered chiefly, 

 in Philadelphia, by the professors in the medical schools. 



It was fully demonstrated, I think, in my former address, that 

 there were good zoologists in America long before there were 

 medical schools, and that Philadelphia was not the cradle of 

 American natural history; although, during its period of polit- 

 ical pre-eminence, immediately after the Revolution, scientific 

 activities of all kinds centred in that city. As for the medical 

 schools it is at least probable that they have spoiled more nat- 

 uralists than they have fostered. 



Dr. Adam Kuhn [b. 1741, d. 1817] was the professor of 

 botany in 1768* — the first in America — and was labeled by his 

 contemporaries " the favorite pupil of Linnseus." Professor 

 Gray, in a recent letter to the w^riter, refers to this saying as a 

 " myth ;" and it surely seems strange that a disciple be- 

 loved by the great vSwede could have done so little for botany. 

 Barton, in a letter, in 1792, to Thunberg, who then occupied 

 the seat of Linnaeus in the University of Upsala, said : 



'' The electricity of your immortal Linne has hardly been felt 

 in this Ultima Thule of science. Had a number of the pupils of 

 that great man settled in North America its riches would have 

 been better known. But, alas ! the only one pupil of your prede- 

 cessor that has made choice of America as the place of his resi- 

 dence has added nothing to the stock of natural knowledge."! 



The Rev. Nicholas Collin, Rector of the Swedisii Churches 

 in Pennsylvania, was a fellow-countryman and acquaintance of 

 Linnaeus \ and an accomplished botanist, having been one of the 

 editors of Muhlenberg's work upon the grasses and an early 

 writer on American linguistics. He read before the Philo- 

 sophical Society, in 1789, "An Essay on those inquiries in 



* See p. 99, nutt. 



fB. S. Barton, in Transactions American Philosophical Society, iii, 



P- 339- 



J " I often heard the great Linnaeus wish that he could have explored 

 the continent of North America." Collin: Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc, iii, 



p. XV. 



