330 PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



ymy elaborated with a care not heretofore displayed in any 

 work upon American botany. It was the first work in which 

 our Northern grasses were treated in a thorough manner, and 

 students of the Graminacecz at the present day find it a most 

 useful book of reference. At an early day the author foresaw 

 that the Linnsean system must be superseded by the natural 

 system of Jussieu. This consideration, together with the loss 

 of a large part of the first volume, led him to abandon the 

 undertaking. In order to supply the immediate wants of stu- 

 dents, he prepared a compendium, which gave brief descrip- 

 tions of the plants contained in the first volume of the Flora 

 and of those which would have been included in the second 

 volume. 



In the same year he published, jointly with Schweinitz, A 

 Monograph of the North American Species of Carex. Two 

 years later his paper entitled Some Account of a Collection of 

 Plants made during a Journey to and from the Rocky Moun- 

 tains in the Summer of 1820, by Edwin P. James, M. D., Assist- 

 ant-Surgeon United States Army, was read before the Lyceum, 

 but it was not published until 1828. It is a memoir of some 

 eighty pages, and enumerates four hundred and eighty-one 

 plants, many of which were new species. This was, up to the 

 date of its publication, the author's most important contribu- 

 tion to science, and is even now frequently referred to by the 

 student of our Western plants. Besides, it has an especial in- 

 terest, as it was the first American work of any importance in 

 which the arrangement was according to the natural system, 

 the only earlier publication in which this system was followed 

 being a list by Abbe Correa, of the genera in Muhlenberg's 

 catalogue, arranged according to the natural orders of Jussieu. 



In 1838 The Flora of North America, by John Torrey and 

 Asa Gray, was commenced. It was published in numbers, and 

 at irregular intervals, until the year 1843. Dr. Asa Gray, then 

 a young physician in Western New York, who had already shown 

 great acuteness in his investigations of the flora of the part of 

 the State in which he resided, was happily associated with Dr. 

 Torrey in this great undertaking of publishing a Flora of North 

 America. The work was suspended with the completion of the 

 Composite, and for sufficient reasons. Just at this time our 

 Government began to explore its Western territory, soon 

 greatly enlarged by the annexation of Texas and the acquisi- 



