TJie Bi'i^iiniiiigs of America)! Science. 419 



to liave taken sufficient interest in the society to nominate for foreign 

 nienil)ersliip the Karl of Buchan, president of the vSociety of vScottish 

 Antiqnarians, and Doctor James Anderson, of Scotland. 



The following- note written by Washington is published in the Memoirs 

 of Rittenhouse: 



The President presents his compliments to Mr. Rittenhouse, and thanks him for 

 the attention he has given to the case of Mr. Anderson and the Earl of Buchan. 

 Sunday Afternoon, 20th April, 1794. 



Of all the Philadelphia naturalists of those early days the one who 

 had the most salutary influence upon the progress of science was per- 

 haps Benjamin Smith Barton [b. 1766, d. 1815]. Barton was the 

 nephew of Rittenhouse and the son of Rev. Thomas Barton, a learned 

 Episcopal clergyman of Lancaster, who was one of the earliest members 

 of the Philosophical Society, and a man accomplished in science. 



He studied at Edinburgh and Gottingen, and at the age of nineteen, 

 in 1785, he was the assistant of Rittenhouse and ElHcott in the work of 

 establishing the western boundary of Pennsylvania, and soon after was 

 sent to Europe, wdaence, having pursued an 'extended course of scientific 

 and medical study, he returned in 1789, and was elected professor of 

 natural history and botany in the University of Pennsylvania. He was 

 a leader in the Philosophical Society, and the founder of the lyinnaeau 

 Society of Philadelphia, before which in 1807 he delivered his famous 

 Discourse on some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History, 

 which did much to excite an intelligent popular interest in the subject. 

 His essays upon natural history topics were the first of the kind to 

 appear in this country. He belonged to the school of Gilbert White and 

 Benjamin Stillingfleet, and was the first in America of a most useful and 

 interesting group of writers, among whom may be mentioned John D. 

 Godman, Samuel Lockwood, C. C. Abbott, Nicholas Pike, John Bur- 

 roughs, Wilson Flagg, Ernest Ingersoll, the Rev. Doctor McCook, Ham- 

 ilton Gibson, Maurice Thompson, and W. T. Hornaday, as well as 

 Matthew^ Jones, Campbell Hardy, Charles Waterton, P. H. Gosse, and 

 Grant Allen, to whom America and England both have claims. 



Barton published certain descriptive papers, as well as manuals of 

 botan}' and materia medica, but in later life had become so absorbed in 

 medical affairs that he appears to have taken no interest in the struggles 

 of the infant Academy of Natural Sciences, which was founded three 

 years before his death, but of which he never became a member. 



His nephew and successor in the presidency of the lyinnaean Society 

 and the University professorship, William P. C. Barton [b. 1786, d. 

 1856] , was a man of similar tendencies, who in early life published papers 

 on the flora of Philadelphia [Florae Philadelphiae Prodromus, 1815] , but 

 later devoted himself chiefly to professional affairs, writing copiously 

 upon materia medica and medical botanj'. 



The admirers of Benjamin Smith Barton have called him the father 



