84 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



his application was followed in a few months by his appoint- 

 ment. 



Dr. Barton had been from early life subject to haemorrhages 

 and to attacks of gout his period of illness while a student at 

 Edinburgh was due to these causes and he had further weak- 

 ened his health by too great application to his scientific and 

 professional labours. He had sustained a severe haemorrhage 

 just before undertaking the labour of preparing for his new 

 position. He had delivered but two courses of lectures on the 

 practice of medicine when his increasing ill health decided him 

 to try the effect of a sea voyage. He accordingly sailed for 

 France in the spring of 1815, and returned in November of that 

 year, but without gaining the benefit hoped for. Hydrothorax 

 came on soon after he landed in New York, and it was three 

 weeks before he was able to reach home. His condition be- 

 came rapidly worse, and on the morning of December 19, 1815, 

 he was found dead in bed. 



Only three days before his death he wrote a memoir on a 

 genus of plants which had been named in honour of him, and 

 requested his nephew, Dr. W. P. C. Barton, to make a drawing 

 to accompany it. The latter did so, and read the memoir at 

 the next meeting of the American Philosophical Society. Dr. 

 Barton was elected to this society January 16, 1789, before his 

 return from his medical studies abroad, and had been one of its 

 vice-presidents since January i, 1802. The printed Transac- 

 tions of the Society afford abundant evidence of his activity as 

 a member and as a man of science. For three years in succes- 

 sion, beginning with 1797, he was chosen to deliver the annual 

 oration. 



In his youth Dr. Barton had suffered the discomforts and 

 hindrances of poverty and the persecutions of those who bore 

 him ill will. But it was not many years before the income 

 from his lectures and his books had lifted him above the influ- 

 ence of want. 



Being prevented by his professional engagements from 

 making explorations in search of plants and other objects of 

 natural history, he employed others to collect for him, advanc- 

 ing his favourite sciences by this means. Frederick Pursh, in 

 his Flora America Septentrionalis (London, 1814), describes an 

 excursion that he was enabled to take by the aid of Prof. 

 Barton. Starting in the beginning of 1805, he went along the 



