15 



and the excellent Peter Collinson, that Peter's early letters 

 abound with oft repeated and emphatic cautions to his friend 

 John, not to allow these delightful studies of nature, equally 

 cherished by them both, to interfere with attention to the 

 duties of life, industry in business, economy, and care of his 

 private affairs ; and that the result should have been, while 

 the London merchant, the prudent counsellor, was successful 

 in business for a time, amassed a large estate, and to the last 

 was highly and universally esteemed for substantial virtues, 

 fell himself into the enticing snare against which he had BO 

 anxiously guarded his friend, leaving an estate greatly dilapi- 

 dated when he died ; while John Bartram held on to the last, 

 with his industries, economies, and care of his estate. The 

 arrears of his claims upon Peter Collinson had accumulated to 

 an amount which gave great anxiety to the son who succeeded 

 him, and drew out the melancholy fact, that his father had 

 felt himself obliged, at over seventy years of age, after a life 

 so much devoted to the public, to ask a small pension from the 

 king, and that it had been denied him. 



Our authority for what Linnaeus said of Bartram is Francis 

 Lieber. Such applause from one so much applauded, must of 

 itself cause naturalists to look with intense interest into memo- 

 rials of his life and doings. All liberal and inquiring minds 

 must be interested to know something of his biography, of 

 whom one of the highest compliments which could be paid to 

 so good a man as Peter Collinson by the just and discriminat- 

 ing Fothergill, was to say, that he made John Bartram what 

 he was. 



He was of the third generation after those who came over 

 with Penn, and settled as agriculturists upon the banks of the 

 Delaware along side of their predecessors, the Swedes, and 

 where the two races have since mingled their blood and ex- 

 tended themselves, constituting now an industrious, virtuous 

 and thriving population, with agricultural improvements, and a 

 general state of worldly prosperity arising from this source, 

 unsurpassed in any quarter of the Union. In his early career 

 he was coteniporary with James Logan, who was himself a dis- 

 tinguished naturalist, and one of the first to appreciate the 

 great idea of Linnaeus ; having tested by his own experiments, 



