INTRODUCTION. 105 



All artists and amateurs in our country concede the palm to Peter Vanderlyn , 

 among whose performances will be remembered his " Ariadne " and his " Wash- 

 ington." 



Music was long since admitted in every plan of female education ; but owing 

 to a strange perverseness, has been almost universally neglected in the education 

 of the other sex. Just sentiments, however, are beginning to prevail. Ele- 

 mentary instruction is now given in many of our primary schools, and it may 

 reasonably be hoped that soon there will be none in which this tasteful and refining 

 art will be omitted. 



It remains to notice the progress of the physical sciences. The notes on these 

 subjects vdll be the more brief, because they are fully investigated in the work 

 which follows this introduction. 



The earliest publication relating to the botany of New- York, was Cadwallader 

 Colden's account of the indigenous plants of Orange county and its vicinity, 

 published in 1744. It is contained in the " Acta Societatis Regise Scientiarum 

 Upsaliensis," and fills two quarto volumes. The catalogue embraced several 

 hundred species, which were carefully described. The " Plantae Coldenhamiae " 

 were frequently quoted by Linnaeus. The traveller Kalm, who visited this 

 country in 1747, under the patronage of the Swedish government, collected a 

 large number of plants and transferred them to his preceptor Linnaeus, by which 

 distinguished naturalist they were described in the " Species Plantarum " and 

 " Systema Vegetabilium." Wangenheim, a Hessian surgeon in the British army, 

 during the American revolution, collected many plants in New- York, and in 

 other portions of the United States, of which he published accounts in 1781 and 

 1787. The Michaux, elder and junior, travelled in New- York in 1792 and in 

 1803. The former published in Paris, in 1803, the " Flora Borealis Americana." 

 The latter, in 1810 and subsequent years, gave a description of our indigenous 

 forest trees, in his splendid work entitled "Arbres Forestiers de TAmerique 

 Septentrionale." C. W. Eddy of New- York, published in the " Medical Repo- 

 sitory," in 1806, a catalogue of the plants growing about Plandome on the 



