16 A CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



you are walking in the streets. This apparent chaos of heterogeneous elements has 

 been brought together, and is kept in motion, under the great form and system of 

 Americanism, with its restless labour, its ever-active spirit of speculation, and its de- 

 votion to utilitarian purposes. 



His two-volume narrative Aus Amerika. Erfahrungen, Reisen und Studien 

 (1857-1858) was abridged as Seven Years' Travel in Central America, Northern 

 Mexico, and the Far West of the United States (1859). He contributed an article 

 on the physical geography of North America, dated "San Francisco, Dec. 8, 1854" 

 to the Ninth Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1855). 



Emanuel Samuels was sent to California jointly by the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion, the Boston Society of Natural History, and Academy of Natural Sciences 

 of Philadelphia to collect birds. He arrived in 1855 and most of his collections 

 were made in the vicinity of Petaluma. What relation, if any, Emanuel Samuels 

 may have borne to "Rev. Mr. Samuels" mentioned by Sereno Watson when he 

 described Chorizanthe valida collected at the Russian Colony in Sonoma County 

 I have not been able to determine. 



General Amos Beebe Eaton, the father of the distinguished Professor of 

 Botany at Yale, Daniel Cady Eaton, collected a few ferns about Carquinez Strait 

 in 1855. 



January 27, 1855, saw the completion of the Panama Railroad from Panama 

 City on the Pacific to Navy Bay, or Aspinwall, on the Atlantic. Its construction 

 had employed in all some seven thousand men drawn from all over the world, 

 some from the mines of California a few years before. Daily service was estab- 

 lished both ways, the fare for adults being set at $25. The running time at first 

 was from five to six hours but was later cut to three hours, with as many as 

 fifteen hundred passengers carried in a single half-day. And, you will be right 

 when you predict : most of the passengers were en route to California ! 



Coming by boat from across the Pacific, Ezechiel Jules Remy, French natu- 

 ralist and explorer, traveled under the nominal auspices of the Natural History 

 Museum of Paris. Remy had been collecting in the Hawaiian Islands intermit- 

 tently between 1851 and 1855 before he arrived in San Francisco in the summer 

 accompanied by the Reverend Julius Brenchley. Brenchley will be remembered 

 for his placing a plaque at the site of David Douglas' grave on the island of 

 Hawaii. Remy and Brenchley left San Francisco on July 18, 1855, for Salt Lake 

 City via Carson Valley. From their extended visit in the Mormon city they pub- 

 lished an illustrated two-volume account of the geographic and social features 

 of the communit3^ Leaving on October 26 Remy traversed the Great Basin to 

 St. George and went on to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which he reached Novem- 

 ber 29. Returning to San Francisco, Remy took passage for Central America. 

 Parry refers briefly to Remy's few plant collections reaching the Natural History 

 Museum at Paris. 



Thomas Bridges, British naturalist and horticultural collector, a Fellow of 

 the Linnaean and Zoological societies of London, had been in South America 

 before coming to San Francisco in November, 1856. There is substantial evidence 

 that he was an enthusiastic collector and he proved to be California's first resi- 

 dent ornithologist. One obituary noted that "few, if any, more useful lives have 

 passed away as martyrs to science during the present century." Bridges' prin- 

 cipal field of collecting was the Sierra Nevada. There he collected seventy-five 



