22 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



in its way tending to enhance the beauty of the flower. 

 'What a shame,' said my mind or something within my 

 mind, 'what a shame that thou hast spent so many years 

 in the ruthless destroying of that which the Lord in His 

 infinite goodness hath made so perfect in its humble place, 

 without thy trying to understand one of its simplest leaves.' 

 This thought awakened my curiosity, for these are not the 

 thoughts to which I had been accumstomed. I returned 

 to my plough once more ; but this new desire for inquiry 

 into the perfections the Lord hath granted all about us did 

 not quit my mind; nor hath it since." 



Thus spoke the venerable John Bartram in his later years 

 of ripeness — the daisy converted the sturdy, Pennsylvanian 

 Quaker farmer into a scientist, the fellow of the greatest 

 intellects of his day. It is a curious fact that of the first 

 botanists of that day, Peter Collinson, Dr. Fothergill, John 

 Bartram and Humphery Marshall were all Quakers and the 

 last two Pennsylvanians ; and it is interesting to consider 

 the bent of mind that caused such to be the case. Even of 

 later years our chief botanists have had more than the 

 relative amount of Quakers in their ranks. John Bartram 

 was never a voluminous writer; self educated, and from 

 inefficient books, he seems always to have handled the pen 

 with a certain stiffness. In his letters he occasionally 

 breaks into a really fine paragraph ; but in spite of a certain 

 directness and freedom from verbosity, he evidently does 

 not feel at liberty with his ink-horn. It was this fact, 

 doubtless, that tended to lose in the dust of the past a name 

 that otherwise would have held its place with the greatest. 

 lint his life was of inestimable value, pouring its rich store- 

 house of learning into Europe, contented that the fruit of 



