Beginnings of Natural History in America. 379 



Creatures of reinarkaljle appearance, which could be preserved with 

 ease, were the first to l)ecoine known. Among fishes, for instance, those 

 with a hard, inflexil)le integument, such as the trunk fishes. Every 

 species of the family Ostraciontidcc was known in P^irope as early as 

 1685; most of them probably a century before. We know that Colum- 

 bus caught a trunk fish and described it in his Voyages. 



Professor Tuckerman has traced in a most instructive manner the 

 beginnings of European acquaintance with American plants, finding 

 traces of the knowledge of a few at a very earl 5^ period: 



Dalechamp, Chisius, Lobel, and Alpinus — all authors of the sixteenth centviry — 

 must be cited occasionally in any complete synonymy of our Flora. The Indian- 

 corn, the side-saddle flower {Sarracenia purpurea and S.Jlava), the columbine, the 

 common milkweed {Asclepias cornuti), the everlasting {Antennaria niargaritacea) , 

 and the Arbor vitcc, were known to the just-mentioned botanists before 1600. Sar- 

 racenia Jlava was sent either from Virginia, or possibly from some Spanish monk in 

 Florida. Clusius's iigure of our well-known northern ^. /)/^^7!>«;ra .... was 

 derived from a specimen furnished to him by one Mr. Claude Gonier, apothecary 

 at Paris, who himself had it from Lisbon ; whither we may suppose it was carried 

 by some fisherman from the Newfoundland coast. The evening primrose ( Oeno- 

 thera biennis) was known in Europe, according to Linn^us, as early as 1614. Poly- 

 gonum sagittatuni and. arafoliuni (tear-thumb) were figured by De Laet, probably 

 from New York specimens, in his Novus Orbis, 1633. Johnson's edition of 

 Gerard's Herbal (1636) .... contains some dozen North American species, 

 furnished often from the garden of Mr. John Tradescant .... and John Park- 

 inson — whose Theatrum Botanicum (1640) is declared by Tournefort to embrace 

 a larger number of species than any work which had gone before it — describes, espec- 

 ially from Cornuti, a still larger number.' 



All the early voyagers were striving for the discovery of a western 

 passage to India, and the West Indies, so called, were considered simply 

 a stage on the journe}^ toward the East Indies. It is not strange, there- 

 fore, that writers should often have failed to distinguish the faunal rela- 

 tions of the animals which they described. Many curious paradoxes in 

 nomenclature have thus arisen — Cassis viadagascaricnsis , for instance, a 

 very misleading name for a common West India mollusk. 



V. 



The seventeenth century bears upon its roll the names of many explor- 

 ers besides those of English origin who have already been named. 

 Within fifty j^ears of the time of Harriot and of the planting of the col- 

 ony at Roanoke, the number and extent of the European settlements in 

 America had become very considerable. Virginia and the New England 

 plantations were growing populous and Maryland was fairly established. 

 Insular colonies were thriving at Newfoundland and Bermuda and on 

 Barbados and elsewhere in the West Indies. 



New Spain and Florida marked the northern limits of the domain of 

 ■ the Spaniards, who had already overrun almost all of South America. 



' Archceologia Americana, IV, pp. 116, 117. 



