IN CALIFORNIA 105 



century after the settlement of California does it 

 seem to have attracted the attention of either trav- 

 eler or botanist. Then, one October day of 1816, 

 came the ship Rurik into San Francisco Bay, bring- 

 ing a Eussian scientific expedition, Otto von Kotze- 

 bue, in command. The naturalist of the party was 

 Adalbert von Chamisso, a French noble by birth, a 

 Prussian soldier by education, a botanist by choice 

 and a poet by inspiration. A few years before, 

 during the Napoleonic wars, he had written a ro- 

 mantic version of an old German legend concern- 

 ing a man who sold his shadow, " Peter Schlemihl's 

 Wonderful History," which the world has not yet 

 forgotten; but in 1816, this remarkable genius was 

 more interested in botanizing than in any other pur- 

 suit, and during the Rurik' 's stay of about a month, 

 von Chamisso in company with the other naturalist 

 of the expedition, Doctor Johann Friedrich Esch- 

 scholz, diligently searched the country around for 

 such specimens of plant life as the season afforded. 

 "The year was already old," he writes in his 

 Journal, "and the country which as Langsdorff 3 had 



3 Gorg Heinrich von Langsdorff, with a previous Russian expe- 

 dition, Count Rezanoff's. He spent six weeks in April and May of 

 1806, in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay, making collections, but 

 his actual contributions to botanical knowledge appear to have been 

 small. He could hardly have failed to see the poppy in its glory at 

 that season, and doubtless it formed part of the "flower garden," 

 as it carpets the spring hillsides of the Bay region to-day. 



