6 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



Pacific Coast towliee. It is interesting to contemplate what might have been the 

 history of California ornithology had Bell decided to stay in the State rather than 

 return to New York ! He died at Sparkhill, New York, in October, 1889. 



John Woodhouse Audubon, son of the famous ornithologist, came overland 

 across Texas and northern Mexico, arriving in San Diego, November 4, 1849. 

 He evidently proceeded to the Sierra diggings directly. The Academy has a 

 direct connection with John Woodhouse Audubon through the late Leslie Simson, 

 mining engineer and sportsman who collected specimens of African big game in 

 Kenya and was also the donor of the California Academy's Simson African Hall. 

 Simson learned taxidermy as a lad from his father, who in turn had been in- 

 structed by John W. Audubon. 



With Audubon came Dr. John Boardman Trask, cofounder with Dr. David 

 Wooster of California's first medical journal. He was the first resident naturalist 

 to describe the State's recent and fossil shells. His work appeared in Volume 

 One of the Academy's Proceedings. Trask, one of the seven founders of the 

 Academy in 1853, later became distinguished as physician, chemist, mineralogist, 

 seismologist, geologist, paleontologist, and botanist. 



Particularly versatile was Dr. Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman, perhaps best 

 known for his association with Senator Leland Stanford, whom he served as per- 

 sonal physician. Dr. Stillman was a writer of some merit, and his book entitled 

 Seeking the Golden Fleece (San Francisco, 1877) is highly readable for its per- 

 sonal approach. He arrived in San Francisco on August 5, 1849, after 194 days' 

 passage on the ship Pacific; the fare from New York was $300. Upon his 

 arrival at Sacramento Stillman began collecting plants, ranging as far afield as 

 Marysville and Long Bar in 1850. Some of this material he sent to John Torrey, 

 and Asa Gray subsequently based Leptosyne stillmanii on part of it. Stillman was 

 a classmate friend of Dr. Charles Christopher Parry at Union College, and they 

 worked together occasionally on the smaller problems of the California flora. 

 Stillman refers to "my old college friend, Charley Parry, botanist [of the Mex- 

 ican Boundary Survey]. Charley is now [1877] on the Gila River." Stillman 's 

 friendship for Parry certainly stood Parry in good stead in securing such favors 

 as railroad passes for his collecting trips and the like. Within the pages of the 

 Overlayid MontJily, dear to the heart of the antiquarian, are buried some spark- 

 ling paragraphs, and not a few were written by naturalists ! One of these stories 

 is "Old Fuller," a vignette of the Day of Resurrection, written by Dr. Stillman. 



The Reverend Augustus Fitch was in southern California between 1846 and 

 1849 and sent a few plants to John Torrej^ perhaps through the suggestion of 

 Dr. Parry, but we lack exact knowledge of this fact. There is a note in the 

 Torrey correspondence of the Reverend Fitch finding Ahronia umbellata at San 

 Francisco and IMonterey and pointing out its technical characters. 



W^illiam Lobb, employee of the large nursery firm of James Veitch, of Exeter, 

 England, arrived in 1849. He had left England at the age of thirty-one and 

 collected seeds and plants in South America before his arrival in California, 

 but his story properly falls a little later in connection with the Big Tree. George 

 Black collected on the Yuba River in 1850; he may have been associated with 

 Lobb but I find no evidence that he was employed by a foreign seed house, and 

 we can only surmise that he may have turned (perhaps unsuccessfully?) from 

 the mines to work with Lobb in the Sierra foothills. 



