44 ERYTHEA. 



1826. I refer to Eschsclioltz's few pages in the tenth volume 

 of Memoirs of the St. Petersburg Academy, in which he 

 names and describes thirteen new species of shrubs and flow- 

 ering plants which, in October, 1816, he had gathered among 

 the sandhills of the San Francisco peninsula. 



V Of course this paper by Eschscholtz does not mark the 

 absolute beginning of writing upon the Californian flora, for 



I 



before that date a dozen or more species of our plants and 

 trees had been published— one here, another there — in vari- 

 ious British, German and Spanish Journals of Science, or 

 volumes of Academy Transactions. 



To voyagers touching a new coast, if good fresh water is 

 the first object of enquiry, wood is the second; and so the 

 trees of a new country naturally claim almost the first 

 attention of even the unbotanical explorer, much more that of 

 the professional or of the amateur botanist. 



The Californian tree first to receive at the hands of a bot- 

 anist a scientific name and diagnosis, and so the first to be 

 made known in the scientific world, is the same which must 

 have suggested to the early English-speaking settlers on our 

 side of San Francisco Bay, the name of Oakland for their 

 village. I refer to Qitercus agrifolia^ commonly called Live 

 Oak. This common name, by the way, is not appropriate. 

 It belongs by right to a very different oak inhabiting the 

 southern Atlantic seaboard, the Quercus Virginiana. Immi- 

 grants from the Southern States to California are doubtless 

 chargeable with having transferred the name of their Atlantic 

 seaboard evergreen white oak to the widely dissimilar Pacific 

 Coast evergreen black oak. And this tree was the subject of 

 the first contribution to Californian dendrology. The 

 materials had been gathered at Monterey by perhaps the first 

 botanist to land in California^ Thaddeus Hsenkej the date of 

 whose arrival was 1791. The publication of this and a few 

 other of our trees was made ten years later, by Luis Nee, in 

 the Annals of Natural Sciences of Madrid, namely, in 180L 

 3o tlien but ^ninety-three years have passed since the dendrol- 

 ogy of the Pacific Coast began to be written with botanical 



