Dr. Hooker on American Botany. 115 



Among these, the first undoubtedly in point of rank and 

 character, will stand the amiable Dr. Muhlenberg, minister 

 of the German church at Lancaster, in Pennsylvania. He 

 was thoroughly conversant with the vegetable productions of 

 his own district, and in a measure with those of America 

 generally : for he published, in 1813, a Catalogue o/* the 

 Plants of North America, which contains a great number of 

 new species ; and what redounds still more to his credit, 

 though it was a posthumous work, he was the author of an 

 excellent treatise on the Grasses arid Sedges of North Ame- 

 rica, which was edited in 1817 by his son, assisted, as he 

 tells us in the preface, by Mr. Elliott, Mr. Baldwin, and Mr. 

 Collins. This work is entirely in Latin. Dr. Muhlenberg 

 carried on a most extensive correspondence with the botanists 

 of Europe, by whom he was greatly esteemed. He supplied 

 the celebrated Hedwig with many of the rare American 

 mosses, which were published either in the Stirpes Crypto- 

 gamicce of that author, or in the Species Muscorum. To 

 Sir J. E. Smith, and Mr. Dawson Turner, he likewise sent 

 many plants, and one of his new mosses was published by the 

 latter gentleman in the Annals of Botany, under the name of 

 Funaria Muhlenbergii. It is well known that Dr. Muh- 

 lenberg possessed very extensive materials for a general de- 

 scription of the plants of the New World ; but what has be- 

 come of these we have been unable to ascertain. His her- 

 barium is in the possession of the American Philosophical 

 Society. 



Another of the friends of Pursh was Dr. B. Smith Barton, 

 a physician and a naturalist, and unquestionably a great pro- 

 moter of Science, and especially of Botany in America. He 

 was appointed Professor of Natural History in the university 

 of Philadelphia in 1789. We recollect, in our early youth, 

 reading with great delight some of his Fragments of Natural 

 History, as they were appropriately termed, which first 

 brought to our notice many highly curious objects of that 

 country, and reminded us of the writings of our own Still— 

 ingfleet and White. He has the credit of publishing an 

 elementary work on Botany, which, though rather diffuse in 

 style, is full of entertaining anecdotes ; and the references 

 and terms being all made applicable to American plants, it 



