LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. XXVU 



was born in the year 1786, at Settle, in Yorkshire. He was 

 originally brought up as a printer, and pursued that business at 

 Halifax and Liverpool, where he worked for some years as a 

 journeyman. The hope of improving his circumstances, which at 

 this period of his life do not seem to have been the most en- 

 couraging, and, as he said, the love of Natural History, induced 

 him to emigrate to the United States, where he landed at Phila- 

 delphia in the spring of 1808. Even at this early period of his 

 life, and in spite of his adverse circumstances, Mr.Nuttall appears to 

 have acquired a considerable amount of knowledge on various sub- 

 jects, and must have made himself acquainted to some extent with the 

 classical languages. Mineralogy seems to have been his earliest and 

 favourite study, but when he landed in America he appears to have 

 been wholly ignorant of botany, a branch of science in which he 

 afterwards acquired his chief reputation. Accidental cireumstancea 

 having introduced the journeyman printer to Professor Barton, 

 a well-known American botanist, an intimacy sprang up between 

 them, and he became imbued with an ardent zeal for the cultivation 

 of botanical science. This zeal was so ardent, in fact, as to induce 

 Mr. Nuttall to undertake long, and sometimes laborious and peril- 

 ous exciu-sions. In the year 1809 he accompanied a Scotch na- 

 turalist, Mr. John Bradbury, in an exploratory expedition into 

 the interior of North America, They started from St. Louis with 

 a party of traders and hunters on the 31st of December, and, cross- 

 ing the Kansas and Platte rivers, passed throvigh different Indian 

 tribes, and, visiting the Mandan villages, ascended the Missouri 

 beyond the point reached by Lewis and Clarke in 1804-5. On 

 this journey, which lasted for two years, the travellers seem to 

 have been exposed to many dangers from the Indians, and to have 

 endured the greatest fatigues. 



Mr. NuttaU returned to Philadelphia with ample treasures of 

 plants, seeds, minerals, and other objects of natural history. For 

 the next eight years he occupied the summer months in botanical 

 excursions, and the winter season in the study and arrangement 

 of his collections, and the preparation of his materials for ' The 

 Genera of the North American Plants,' which was published in 

 1818. Of this work, upon which principally stands the reputation 

 of Mr. NuttaU as a botanist. Professor Torrey in the preface to his 

 ' Flora ' remarks that " it has contributed, more than any other, to 

 the advance of tlie accurate knowledge of the plants of the United 

 • States.'.' It is a curious circumstance that tlie author himself set 

 up the best part of the type, and sucli was his accuracy in type- 



