Dr. Hooker on American Botany. 109 



now decorate many of our plantations and pleasure grounds, 

 and as the quality of their timber comes to be better known 

 and appreciated, they will doubtless occupy a conspicuous 

 place in our woods and forests. Our shrubberies owe their 

 greatest beauty to the various species of Kalmia, Azalea, Rhodo- 

 dendron, Robinia, Cornus, Sarnbucus, Ceanothus, and Lonicera, 

 to the Syringa, the flowering Raspberry, and a hundred 

 others, which flourish as if they were the aboriginal natives 

 of our soil ; whilst the gardens of the curious are indebted 

 for many of their choicest productions to the herbaceous plants 

 of North America, the greater number being remarkable for 

 the brilliancy of their blossoms, and not a few, such as the 

 Dioncea and Sarracenia, striking us as amongst the most sin- 

 gular of all vegetable productions in their structure. Nay, 

 such is the superiority of the climate, and the fertility of the 

 soil, that our European fruits, which were taken over by the 

 early settlers, have improved prodigiously in quality ; to that 

 degree, even that we now procure grafts of them for our orch- 

 ards and wall-trees ; and the most highly flavoured apples 

 that we (north of the Tweed at least,) can obtain for our des- 

 serts, are actually imported themselves from America. 



In the arctic regions of the New World, there is a striking 

 similitude in the botanical productions with those of the sum- 

 mits of our highest Scotch mountains. 



The earliest accounts of the plants of North America con- 

 sist of detached memoirs, principally published by foreigners, 

 the Americans being themselves, for a long time, too much 

 occupied in commerce and agriculture to devote their time 

 and attention to science ; nor is it till a country has ar- 

 rived at that degree of political and mental improvement to 

 which we find the United States now to have attained, that 

 we can expect any branch of science to be estimated as it de- 

 serves. 



A small history of the Plants of Canada by Cornuti ap- 

 peared in Paris in 1635. About the year 1740 was published 

 Catesby's Natural History qf Carolina, &c. in 2 vols, large 

 folio, illustrated with a great number of highly coloured fi- 

 gures of plants, &c. Gronovius edited the Flora Virginica 

 of Clayton, at Leyden, in 1739. In the Memoirs of the 

 American Academy, Dr, Cutler printed his Account of the 



