266 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



Monograph " should be considered and quoted in all respects as the 

 joint production of Dr. Torrey and himself." Ten or eleven years 

 later, in the succeeding volume of the Annals of the New York 

 Lyceum, appeared Di*. Torrey's elaborate ISIonograph of the other 

 North American Cyperaceae, with an appended revision of the Carices, 

 which meanwhile had been immensely increased by the collections of 

 Richardson, Drummond, &c., in British and Arctic America. A full 

 set of these was consigned to his hands for study (along with other 

 important collections), by his friend Sir William Hooker, upon the 

 occasion of a visit which he made to Europe in 1833. But Dr. Torrey 

 generously turned over the Carices to the late Professor Dewey, whose 

 rival Caricography is scattered through forty or fifty volumes of the 

 " American Journal of Science and Arts ; " and so had only to sum up 

 the results in this regard, and add a few southern species at the close 

 of his own Monograph of the order. 



About this time, namely, in the year 1836, upon the organization of 

 a geological survey of the State of New York upon an extensive plan, 

 Dr. Torrey was appointed Botanist, and was required to prepare a 

 P'lora of the State. A laborious undertaking it proved to be, involving 

 a heavy sacrifice of time, and postponing the realization of long- 

 cherished jjlans. But in 1843, after much discouragement, the Flora 

 of the State of New York, the largest if by no means the most im- 

 portant of Dr. Torrey's works, was completed and published, in two 

 large quarto volumes, with 161 plates. No other State of the Union 

 has produced a Flora to compare with this. The only thing to be 

 regretted is that it interrupted, at a critical period, the jjrosecution of a 

 far more important work. 



Early in his career Dr. Torrey had resolved to undertake a general 

 flora of North America, or at least of the United States, arranged 

 upon the natural system, and had asked Mr. Nuttall to join him, who, 

 however, did not consent. At that time, when little was known of the 

 regions west of the valley of the Mississippi, the ground to be covered 

 and the materials at hand were of comparatively moderate compass ; 

 and, in aid of the northern part of it, Sir William Hooker's Flora of 

 British America — founded upon the rich collections of the Arctic 

 explorers, of the Hudson's Bay Company's intelligent officers, and of 

 such hardy and enterprising pioneers as Drummond and Douglas — 

 was already in progress. At the actual inception of the enterprise, 

 the botany of Eastern Texas was opened by Drummond's collections. 

 as well as that of the coast of California by those of Douglas, and 

 afterward those of Nuttall. As they clearly belonged to our own 



