James.] g^2 [February. 



ancestry on both sides, I may say that my blood is purely Anglican, 

 without a cross. 



" My father inherited a farm from his maternal grandfather. It is 

 situated in the Township of Birmingham, five miles south of West 

 Chester, about midway between the two localities on which the 

 battle of Brandywine was fought. On that farm I was born and 

 brought up until I nearly completed my eighteenth year. I was the 

 eldest son, and being designed for a farmer, I was put to all sorts of 

 agricultural labor as I became capable of it. I was not permitted to 

 go to school, except in the winter season, after I was thirteen years 

 old; and yet I manifested at an early age a much greater fondness 

 for books than hard work ! 



" My mother taught me to read while I was quite young; and I 

 recollect often hearing the dear old lady tell the neighbor women 

 that her Billy had read the Bible through before he was six years old. 



"Before I was eighteen I had conceived such an aversion to the 

 uninteresting drudgery of the farm, and felt such a desire to engage 

 in some kind of study or scientific pursuit, that my father consented 

 to let me study medicine, which was the profession I selected, on ac- 

 count of its connection with the most interesting natural sciences. 



"Accordingly, on the 1st of April, 1800, I commenced the study 

 of medicine, in Wilmington, Delaware, with Dr. John Vaughan, a 

 respectable physician of that place. In the autumn of that year 

 I began the study of the French language with an accomplished 

 scholar. 



" In 1802, I became conscious of a taste for botanical researches, 

 which was awakened by the perusal of Darwin's Botanic Garden, 

 but there was no one then in Wilmington to aid me, and I made 

 little progress. In the autumn of that year, Wilmington was visited 

 by the malignant yellow fever; such was its mortality and the con- 

 sefpient dismay, that all the physicians, except my preceptor, inglori- 

 ously fled; he, and I, his humble student, were the only medical per- 

 sonages who staid to attend the sick ; we persevered through an ar- 

 duous and anxious sea.son, and were mercifully favored to escape the 

 disease. 



" In November, 1802, I repaired to Philadelphia, to attend the me- 

 dical lectures in the University of Pennsylvania, where I was favored 

 to become familiarly acquainted with Prof. B. S. Barton, who dis- 

 covering in me a considerable fondness for the study of plants, took 

 nie under his special patronage, and by his kind attention and in- 

 struction gave a decided bias to my future pursuits. A society was 



