WILLIAM STARLING SULLIVANT. 371 
newly settled country, and least of all by those who have pos- 
sessions. 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 brother Joseph, 
next in age, 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 undertook 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 Phe- 
nogamous botany is a short article upon three new plants which 
he had discovered in that district, contributed to the “« Ameri- 
can Journal of Science and Arts,” in the year 1842. The 
observations which he continued to make were communicated 
to his correspondents and friends, the authors of the Flora of 
North America, then in progress. As soon as the flowering 
plants of his district had ceased to afford him novelty, he 
turned to the Mosses, in which he found abundant scientific 
occupation, of a kind well suited to his bent for patient and 
close observation, scrupulous accuracy, and nice discrimina- 
tion. His first publication in his chosen department, the 
‘“‘Musci Alleghanienses,” was accompanied by the specimens 
themselves of Mosses and Hepaticw collected in a botanical 
expedition through the Alleghany Mountains from Maryland 
to Georgia, in the summer of 1843, the writer of this notice 
being his companion. The specimens were not only criti- 
cally determined, but exquisitely prepared and mounted, and 
with letter-press of great perfection; the whole forming two 
quarto volumes, which well deserve the encomium bestowed 
1 His first wife, Jane Marshall of Kentucky, was a niece of Chief 
Justice Marshall. She died a few years after marriage. 
