Bcgiiiiii/iq;s of Natural History in .Idi erica. 403 



Harvard appears to have had the first separate professorship of natural 

 history, which was filled by William Dandridge Peck, a zoologist and 

 botanist of prominence in his da3^ 



A professorship of botany was established in Columbia College, New 

 York, as early as 1795, at which time Doctor David Hosack [b. in New 

 York, 1769, d. 1835] was the incumbent. Doctor Hosack brought with 

 him from Europe, in 1790, the first cabinet of minerals ever seen in the 

 United States. In its arrangement he was assisted by one of his pupils, 

 Archibald Bruce, who became, in 1806, professor of mineralogy, and who, 

 soon after, in 18 10, established the American Journal of Mineralogy. 



Doctor Hosack was the founder of the first public botanic garden — 

 this was in New York in 1801; another was founded in Charleston in 

 1804. These had disappeared forty years ago, and the one at Cambridge, 

 established in 1808, is the only one now in existence. 



The first public museum was that founded in Philadelphia, in 1785, by 

 Charles Willson Peale, the bones of a mammoth and a stuffed paddlefish 

 forming its nucleus. This establishment had a useful career of nearly 

 fifty years. 



VII. 



We have now rehearsed the story of the earliest investigators of Amer- 

 ican natural history, including two centuries of English endeavor, and 

 nearly three if we take into consideration the earlier explorations of the 

 naturalists of continental Europe. We have seen how, in the course of 

 many generations, the intellectual supremacy of the Western Continent 

 went from the Spaniards and the French and the Dutch to the new 

 people who were to be called Americans, and we have become acquainted 

 with the men who were most thoroughly identified with the scientific 

 endeavors of each successive period of activity. 



The achievements of American science during the century which has 

 elapsed since the time when Franklin, Jefferson, Rittenhouse, and Rum- 

 ford were its chief exponents have been often the subject of presidential 

 addresses like this, and the record is a proud one. During the last fifty 

 years in England, and the last forty in America, discovery has followed 

 discovery with such rapid succession that it is somewhat hard to realize 

 that American science in the colonial period, or even that of Europe at 

 the same time, had any features which are worthy of consideration. 



The naturalists whose names I have mentioned were the intellectual 

 ancestors of the naturalists of to-day. Upon the foundations which they 

 laid the superstructure of modern natural history is supported. Without 

 the encyclopedists and explorers there could have been no Ray, no Klein, 

 no Linnaeus. Without the systematists of the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century the school of comparative anatomists would never have arisen. 

 Had Cuvier and his disciples never lived there would have been no place 

 for the philosophic biologists of to-day. 



