Beginnings of Natural History in America. 399 



nent of America was peopled with living forms, shows a remarkable 

 appreciation of the difficulties in the way of the solution of this still 

 unsolved problem. The position taken by its author is not unlike that 

 held by zoogeographers of to-day, in considering it necessary to bridge 

 with laud the waters between Asia and Northwestern America, and 

 Africa and South America. ' In his first Dissertation of the Animals of 

 Mexico he combats the prevailing European views as to the inferiority 

 of the soil and climate of the New World and the degeneracy of its 

 inhabitants, engaging in the same battle in which fought also Harriot, 

 Acosta, and Jefferson. 



Clavigero's contributions to archaeology and ethnology are extensive 

 and valuable, and we can but admit that at the time of the issue of his 

 Storia Antica no work concerning America had been printed in English 

 which was equally valuable. 



Although in his formal discus.sion of the natural history of Mexico he 

 follows closely the nomenclature and arrangement of Hernandez, there 

 are many important original observations inserted. I will instance only 

 the notes on the mechanism of the poison gland and fang of the rattle- 

 snake, the biographies of the possum, the coyote and the tapir, and the 

 Tuza or pouched rat, the mocking bird, the chegoe, and the cochineal 

 insect. Clavigero states that Father Inamma, a Jesuit missionar}^ of 

 CaHfornia, has made many experiments upon snakes which serve to 

 confirm those made by Mead upon vipers. 



To the post-Revolutionary period belongs Doctor Manasseh Cutler, 

 for fifty-one 3^ears minister of Ipswich Hamlet, Massachusetts [b. 1743, 

 d. 1823], who in 1785 published An Account of some of the vegetable 

 Productions, naturally growing in this Part of America, botanically 

 arranged,^ in which he described about 370 species. Cutler was a cor- 

 respondent of Muhlenberg in Pennsylvania, Swartz and Payshull in 

 Sweden, and Withering and Stokes in England. He left unpublished 

 manuscripts of great value. He was one of the founders of the settle- 

 ment in Ohio, and at one time a member of Congress. After Cutler, 

 says Tuckerman, there appeared in the Northeastern States nothing of 

 importance until the new school of New England botanists, a school 

 characterized by the names of an Oakes, a Boott, and an Emerson, was 

 founded in 18 14, by the publication of Bigelow's Florula Bostoniensis. 



Thomas Walter [b. in Hampshire, 1740] published in London, in 1787, 

 his Flora Caroliniana, a scholarly work describing the plants of a region 

 situate upon the Santee River. ^ 



Doctor Hugh Williamson, of North Carolina [b. 1735, d. 1819], was a 

 prominent member of the American Philosophical Society. He was con- 



' See similar speculation in George Scot's Model of the Goveratueut (it tlie Pro- 

 vince of East New Jersey in America. Edinburgh, 1685. 

 ^ Memoirs of the American Academy of Sciences, 1785. 

 3Brendel, American Naturalist, December, 1879, P- 758. 



