Brginunios of Natural History in Anwrica. 39^ 



books which are more delightful than Darhngtoii's Memorial oi Bartraiu 

 and Smith's Correspondence of I^innteus, niade up as they are largely of 

 the letters which passed between Collinson and Ellis and their corre- 

 spondents in America, and with Liiniseus, to whom they were constantly 

 transmitting American notes and specimens.' 



Humphrey Marshall [b. 1722, d. iSoi] was a farmer-botanist of the 

 Bartram type, and the author of The American Grove, a treatise upon 

 the forest trees and shrubs of the United States, the first botanical work 

 which was entirely American. Darlington's Memorials of Bartram and 

 Marshall is a worthy tribute to this useful man. 



Moses Bartram, a nephew of John, was alsoabotani.st, and William, his 

 son [b. 1739, d. 1823], was a nutch more prominent figure in American 

 science. His Travels through North and South Carolina, published in 

 1 79 1, was, in the opinion of Coues, the starting point of the distinctively 

 American school of ornithology. 



Collinson was a correspondent of Benjamin Franklin, and is said not 

 only to have procured and sent to him the first electrical machine which 

 came to America, but to have made known to him in 1743 the results of 

 the first experiments in electricity, the continuation of which gave to 

 Franklin his European reputation as a man of science. Collinson was 

 instrumental in introducing grape culture in Virginia, and in acclimating 

 here many foreign ornamental shrubs. 



Ellis was a more eminent man of science, and his name is associated 

 with the beginnings of modern marine zoology. 



Linnaeus wrote to him in 1769: "Your discoveries may be said to vie 

 with those of Columbus. He found out America, or a new India, in the 

 west ; 3'ou have laid open hitherto unknown Indies in the depths of the 

 ocean." He was royal agent for West Florida, and had extraordinary 

 facilities for obtaining specimens from the colonies. 



His nephew, Henry Ellis, F. R. S. [b. 1720, d. 1805], was the author 

 of A Voyage to Hudson's ]?ay in 1746 and 1747 for Discovering a North 

 West Passage, which contains some valuable notes upon zoology. He 

 was in 1756 appointed governor of the colony of Georgia, and in 1758 

 published in the Philosophical Transactions an essay on The Heat of 

 the Weather in Georgia. In 1760 he made a voyage for the discovery 

 of a new pas.sage to the Pacific, and later w^as governor of Nova Scotia, 

 where we can but believe he continued his obser\-alions and his corre- 

 spondence with the .savans of Europe. " Finally," says Jones, "having 

 attained a venerable age, and to the last intent upon the prosecution of 

 some favorite physical researches, he fell in sleep, as did Pliny the Elder, 

 within sight of Vesuvius, and upon the shores of the beautiful Bay of 

 Naples, ' ' ■ 



'William Darlington, Memorials of John Bartram and Ilnniphrev Marshall. Phil- 

 adelphia, 1849, 1S50. 



-Charles C. Jones, History of Georgia. P.oslon and New York, 1863. 



