The botanical work of Ezra Michener 
C. L. SHEAR AND Nett E. STEVENS 
The reputation of a botanist depends so largely on publication 
that important work of collecting and collaboration may be very 
soon forgotten. This has been too nearly true of the botanical 
work of Dr. Ezra Michener. Almost all of his long life (1794- 
1887) was spent in a small village in the southern portion of Chester 
County, Pennsylvania, ‘‘almost entirely isolated,” as he says, 
“from the seats of learning, from scientific libraries, and from 
personal intercourse with the cultivators of science”’ (8, p. iii). 
In addition to the numerous duties of a country physician and of 
a prominent citizen interested in reform movements he accumu- 
lated a valuable herbarium, contributed to Darlington’s Flora 
Cestrica, published a “‘ Manual of Weeds”’ (7) for popular use, re- 
arranged and mounted the extensive Schweinitz collections of 
fungi in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and 
carried on a correspondence and exchange of specimens with the 
leading mycologists of his time. — 
Michener himself seems to have regarded his botanical work 
as, of little importance. In his “ Autographical Notes”’ (8), a 
volume of two hundred pages, in which he gives the main facts 
of his life and interests, he speaks of his ‘‘innate fondness for 
plants’”’ and describes his early progress in the study of botany. 
Later references to botanical work are largely incidental, as when 
_ he describes a botanical press which he devised (p. 43), or speaks 
_ of rearranging his herbarium of more than a thousand plants during 
an illness which occurred in 1843 (p. 52), or of collecting plants 
while on a trip to Virginia in 1846 (p. 59). He refers, however, to 
assisting Dr. Darlington in the preparation of the Florula Cestrica 
(p. 43). The above facts are summarized by Harshberger (5) in his © 
“Botanists of Philadelphia.” A brief biological note, reprinted 
from the West Chester Republican, was also published in the 
Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal, July 2, 1887 (9). 
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