244 PITTONIA. 
touching and eloquent farewell to America,’ and he had left 
our shores, men after a time began occasionally to entertain 
their juniors, by rehearsing some of Nuttall’s eecentricities. 
Many of us have heard them reeounted, by genial men whose 
happy voices we now no longer hear, the loss of whom we all 
deplore. But elder men’s mirthfulness, albeit not ill-meant, 
is none the less liable to engender a little prejudice when the 
subject of it isa person. At the very least, it does not foster 
veneration. d 
In the well written Century article of two years ago, it is 
well shown how ornithologists, down to our day, extol the 
merits and revere the name of this great man. But his ser- 
vices to botany were far more varied and extensive than those 
which he rendered to any or all the departments of zoological 
science; and, if he is not just now duly appreciated among 
botanists, it is because we are a generation who have allowed 
our botanical vision of Nuttall to become obscured by a sort 
of prejudice; not very deep, or strong, it may be ; nor attribu- 
table to any malicious effort that has ever been made to 
detract from the man’s merits. We never heard that he had 
enemies, or envious rivals. And he who could, in the face of 
such obstacles as plebeian birth and early poverty without 
patronage, in four and thirty years, aecomplish all which he 
accomplished, placing his name first on the roll of American 
scientific men, and all by quiet, unobtrusive, hard and unre- 
mitting toil of all sorts, must almost have been, in his inmost 
- self, 
* Too great for praise, too high for rivalry.” 
Certain am I of this: that his whole career is, to this day, 
simply without a parallel, in the annals of natural science in 
the United States of America. 
I sincerely hope that these remarks may secure from 
some of our younger men a real attention to Nuttall's im- 
portant part in the making of the Torrey and Gray Flora. 
This has been my chief end in writing these paragraphs. 
And yet, I can not conclude without making more distinct 
! Preface to N. Am. Sylva. 
