1864.] 330 [James. 



West Chester, in 1832, he studied under his instructions the Spanish 

 language, and took delight in perusing many works of celebrity in 

 that tongue. 



Dr. Dai'lington's interest in the botanists of his native State, in- 

 duced him to compile selections from the correspondence, with occa- 

 sional notes and a biographical sketch of his intimate friend and 

 classmate, the late William Baldwin, M.D., Surgeon in the United 

 States Navy, who died whilst on an expedition up the Missouri, under 

 Major Long, which he published in 1843, under the title of Reliquiae 

 Baldwinianas. 



A few years afterwards, from the materials put into his hands, he 

 collected the correspondence of two of the early and venerable pio- 

 neers of botany in Pennsylvania, to which he appended a brief notice 

 of the life of each, and published them in 1849, in one large volume, 

 as the Memorials of John Bartram and Humphry Marshall, with 

 notices of their botanical contemporaries. 



In these worthies of a former generation he was deeply interested, 

 and alluded to himself with his usual humility of his own name 

 going down to posterity as an epiphyte clinging to their sturdy 

 branches. Much credit must be accorded to him for the patient per- 

 severance in rescuing from oblivion these very interesting letters, 

 many of them written by the most distinguished European botanists 

 of Linnajus's time, and comprising some of the epistolary correspond- 

 ence of the two venerable Penn,«ylvanians, and which the editor per- 

 suades himself that the lovers of nature and admirers of native worth 

 amongst us will regard with interest. 



Humphry Marshall, it is believed, published the first truly indi- 

 genous botanical essay in this Western heujisphere. It appeared in 

 the year 1785, in the form of a duodecimo of about two hundred 

 pages, under the title of Arbustum Americanum, the American 

 Grove, and is dedicated to the officers and members of the American 

 Philosophical Society. 



Among Dr. Darlington's contributions to the history of his native 

 State must be mentioned an interesting paper on the famous "Mason 

 and Dixon's line." He has given an excellent account of this memor- 

 able controversy between Lord Baltimore and the family of Penn, 

 which lasted from 16s2 to 1767. 



From his untiring research and extreme accuracy in detail, he was 

 well fitted for an antiquarian, but the ever-open book of nature, 

 whose hieroglyphics he tried to elucidate and expound, had higher 

 claims to him than old manuscripts and musty tomes. 



