Beginnings of Natural History in An/rrica. 385 



Darstellungeyi), filling the interspace between "The Zoology of the 

 Middle Ages" and "the period of Systematic Classification." Students 

 of science had ceased to compile endless commentaries on the works 

 of Aristotle, and had begun to record their own observations and 

 thoughts, to gather new facts and materials, which were to serve as a 

 basis for the systematic work for their successors. 



The greatest names of the day among naturalists were those of Ray, 

 Tournefort, Lister, Jonston, Goedart, Redi, Willughby, Swamnierdam, 

 Sloane, Jung, and Morrison; names not often referred to at the present 

 day, but worthy of our recollection and veneration, for they were men of 

 a new era — the pioneers in systematic zoolog}^ and botany. 



Among the earliest representatives of the new school in North America 

 were Banister, Clayton, Mitchell, and Garden. John Banister, a clergy- 

 man of the Church of England, emigrated to Virginia before 1668, and 

 in addition to his clerical duties applied himself assiduously to the study 

 of natural history. He was a disciple and also, no doubt, a pupil of the 

 great English naturalist, John Ray, who called him in his Historia Plan- 

 taruni, "erudissimus vir et consummatissimus Botanicus," and corre- 

 sponded also with lyister, and Compton, Bishop of London. He w^as the 

 first to observe intelligently the mollusks and insects of North America. 

 In a paper communicated to the Royal Society in 1693 he refers to draw- 

 ings of ten or twelve kinds of land snails and six of fresh-water mussels. 

 The drawings were not published, nor were the notes, except those in 

 reference to the circulation of a species of snail.' 



He sent to Petiver, in 1680, a collection of fifty-two species of insects, 

 his observations upon which, with notes by Petiver, were a few years 

 later communicated to the Royal Society."^ Among them many familiar 

 forms are recognizable — the mudwasp, seventeen - year locust, cimex, 

 cockroach, firefly, the spring beetle {Elater), and the tobacco moth. He 

 appears to have drawn and described .several phases of the life history 

 of the ichneumon fly. He had in his possession in 1686, and exhibited 

 to an English traveler, large bones and teeth of fossil mammals from the 

 interior of Virginia, the first of which we have any record in North 

 America.^ 



It was as a botanist, however, that he was best known. He made 

 drawings of the rarer species, and transmitted these with his notes and 

 dried specimens to Compton and Ray. Banister's Catalogus Plantarum 

 in Virginia Observatarum, printed in 1686,'* was the first systematic paper 



•Philosophical Transactions, XVII, 1693, pp. 671, 672. See also Transactions of 

 the Linngean Society, VII, p. 227. 



- Some Observations concerning Insects made by Mr. John Banister, in Virginia, 

 A. D. 1680, with Remarks on them by Mr. James Petiver, etc. Philosophical Trans- 

 actions, XXII, 1701, pp. 807-814. 



3 Perhaps the 3legalonyx jeffersouii, subsequently discovered. 



■*In Ray's Historia Plantarum, London, 1686. 

 NAT MUS 97, PT 2 25 



