THE BOTANISTS OF PHILADELPHIA. 151 



habits and wide reading, of an inquiring and original turn 

 of mind, the fruitfuhiess of which was subdued by chronic 

 invalidism. When he went to Paris he took with him his 

 herbarium, which for that time was unusually rich in 

 plants of Lower Georgia and Florida, and w^e remember his 

 remark that his botanical acquaintances there made very 

 free use of his permission to help themselves to the dupli- 

 cates. There is reason to think that the remains of it went 

 to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. He is 

 the father of the two Le Contes of the University of Cali- 

 fornia. 



THOMAS NUTTALL. 



Thomas Nuttall * was born in 1786, in the town of 

 Settle in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, in humble 

 circumstances. At an early age he was apprenticed to an 

 uncle, a printer by trade, either in his native town or in 

 Liverpool, where he worked as a journeyman for several 

 years, until he went to seek employment in London. 



When twenty-two years of age he sailed for America, 

 landing in Philadelphia. He was a studious young man, 

 knowing the history of his country, familiar with some 

 branches of natural history and even with Latin and Greek. 

 It is thus recorded in the biographical sketch of Nuttall, 

 read by Elias Durand f before the American Philosophical 

 Society : 



"When, in 1824, Professor Torrey was preparing for 

 publication his ' Flora of the Northern and Middle States,^ 



* Popular Science Monthly, XLVI (1895), 689, from which the main facts are 

 gleaned. See also The Gardener's Monthly (Meehan), IV, p. 21, for biography to 

 accompany the frontispiece in that journal, drawn on stone by M. S. Parker; L. N, 

 Rosenthal, Lithographer. 



t Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc, VII, 125. 



