Dr. Porter* s Address. 9 



tirpation in the future there is not the slightest "dan- 

 ger, will bring his name up before thousands in the 

 coming ages and prompt them to learn from other 

 sources all they can of his personal history. 



In 1780, the year of Muhlenberg's settlement in 

 Lancaster, another great Pennsylvania-German nat- 

 uralist, the Rev. /Davi^IyewisJ von Schweinitz, was 

 born at Bethlehem. His father was of an ancient 

 and distinguished family of Silesia and his mother a 

 grand-daughter of Count Zinzendorf. Designed for 

 the ministry in the Moravian Church, his early edu- 

 cation was received in the school at Nazareth, where 

 he exhibited an enthusiastic fondness for cryptogamic 

 botany. In 1778 he went to Europe with his father, 

 for the purpose of fuller classical and theological 

 training at Niesky in Upper Lusatia. There he de- 

 voted his leisure hours to the Fungi, and, in conjunc- 

 tion with Professor Albertini, published at Leipsic a 

 volume on the species of the order discovered around 

 Niesky, for which, as a mark of appreciation, the de- 

 gree of Ph. D M was conferred upon him by the Uni- 

 versity of Kiel. On his return to America, in 1812, 

 he was appointed general agent of his Church in 

 North Carolina and in this new field continued his 

 labors, the results of which were printed at Raleigh 

 in 1821. Ten years later, his great work, "A Synop- 

 sis of the Fungi of North America" was presented to 

 the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, 

 and in it the number of species enumerated or de- 

 scribed is 3098, including 1203 new to science. Dur- 

 ing the same period he prepared his well-known 



