2 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



and varied attention. He became surveyor and practical 

 engineer, and indeed took an active part in business 

 down to a recent period. Leisure is hardly to be had in 

 a newly settled country, and least of all by those who 

 have possessions. Mr. Sullivant must have reached the 

 age of nearly thirty years, and, having married early,* 

 was established in his suburban residence in a rich floral 

 district, before his taste for natural history was at all 

 developed. . His j'oungest brother, Joseph, was already 

 somewhat proficient in botany as well as in conchology 

 and ornithology ; and when in some way his own interest 

 in the subject was at length excited, he took it up with 

 characteristic determination to know well whatever he 

 imdertook to know at all. He collected and carefully 

 studied the plants of the central part of Ohio, made neat 

 sketches of the minuter parts of many of them, especially 

 of the Grasses and Sedges, entered into communication 

 with the leading botanists of the country, and in 1840 he 

 published " A Catalogue of Plants, Native or Naturalized, 

 in the Vicinity of Columbus, Ohio," pp. 63, to which he 

 added a few pages of valuable notes. His only other 

 direct publication in ph^enogamous botany is a short 

 article upon three new plants which he had discovered 

 in that district, contributed to the American Journal of 

 Science and the Arts, in the year 1842. The observa- 

 tions which he continued to make w^ere communicated to 

 his correspondents and friends, the authors of the ''Flora 

 of North America," then in progress. As soon as the flow- 

 ering plants of his district had ceased to afford him nov- 

 elty, he turned to the Mosses, in which he found abun- 

 dant scientific occupation, of a kind well suited to his 

 bent for patient and close observation, scrupulous accu- 

 racy, and nice discrimination. His first publication in 

 his chosen department, the"Musci Alleghanienses," was 



* His first wife, Jane Marshall of Kentucky, was a niece of Chief Justice 

 Marshall. She died -within a year after marriage. 



