866 



natural history with great assiduity, as do the gentlemen mentioned 

 above. President Hitchcock has long been considered the most 

 learned geologist in America. 



My object in attending to the study of botany, was to investigate 

 the medical properties of such plants as we might discover in our 

 peregrinations and wanderings. The field had been but partially 

 explored, and many of our plants, in the language of the immortal 

 Hush, were " exhaling their virtues in the desert air." After my 

 marriage, in 1818, to Miss Harriet T. Goodhue, I was greatly as- 

 sisted by my wife, who drew and painted most of the plants painted 

 by Mrs. Hitchcock, besides very many others from nature, and from 

 other sources. In subsequent years, this collection of paintings has 

 been very much enlarged by my daughter Helen Maria (now Mrs. 

 Huntington), and my younger daughter, Caroline Willard. The 

 paintings now in my possession, principally of medical plants, from 

 these and other sources, amount to several hundred, which, to me at 

 least, are invaluable, and they have been of great service to me in 

 my lectures on medical botany at Dartmouth Medical College, and 

 upon materia medica in the Willoughby University of Ohio. This, 

 in my opinion, is the most permanent and beautiful method of pre- 

 paring what may be called a fac-simile of an herbarium. There is no 

 danger of the destruction of the paintings from insects, and of the 

 fading of the plants from the ravages of time. I have availed my- 

 self, also, of all the limited means in my power, to procure our valu- 

 able, and even costly works upon Medical Botany. In this way, 

 I have enriched my library with the splendid work of W. P. C. Bar- 

 ton, with the beautiful plates of Michaux, and many other splendid 

 works. While making my collection of coloured engravings of 

 plants, I have devoted much of my attention to the investigation of 

 the medicinal properties of the plants which have been found in this 

 section of the country; and so long ago as the year 1819, 1 compiled 

 a volume upon the medical virtues of our plants, culling information 

 from every source within my reach, both regular and empirical, and 

 I have been adding to that collection ever since. If I have not re- 

 corded much that is new, I trust I have at least enlarged the bound- 

 aries of our vegetable Materia Medica. In this report, however, of 

 the Medical Botany of Massachusetts, I can only give an outline or 

 skeleton of the properties of the plants enumerated. An extended 

 account of their uses would comprise a volume of no inferior dimen- 

 sions. 



Rather than cumber the individual articles upon which I have 



