172 PETER COLLINSON AND JOHN BARTRAM CH. 



Collinson's garden was situated at first at Peckham, 

 but in 1749 he removed to Mill Hill, eight miles north- 

 west of London. The house was on the summit of a 

 hill, from which the grounds sloped westward, offering 

 a wide prospect over woodland country to Harrow and 

 beyond. The view is one of the finest near London, and 

 includes in clear weather the heights of Surrey, Windsor 

 Castle, and on the eastern side Epping Forest. Here 

 Collinson gradually brought all his treasures, and his 

 garden became well known for its rare plants, many of 



Brittannica, a popular work on vegetable medicines, when it was reprinted 

 by Franklin in 1751. See also Proud, Pennsylvania, i. 218 ; Aiton, Hortus 

 Kewensis ; Sir J. E. Smith, Correspondence of Linnaus Phil. Trans, xlii-liii ; 

 S. Miller, Retrospect of Eighteenth Cent. i. iii. ; Bartram's Garden, issued by the 

 John Bartram Association, Philadelphia, 1904 ; Harshberger, The Botanists 

 of Philadelphia ; Dr. Howard A. Kelly, Some American Medical Botanists, 

 1914 ; John Bartram, Botanist, by the present writer, Friends' Quart. Examiner, 

 April 1915. 



Bartram, jointly with his son, issued a printed sheet, containing a list of 

 Forest Trees and Shrubs growing in their garden. This is referred to by 

 Humphry Marshall, and seems to have been used for trade purposes. No 

 copy is now known, save one in MS. at the British Museum. Catalogues 

 dating from Bartram's gardens after his time are extant. Letter to the Author 

 from J. M. Macfarlane, Director, Botanic Garden, Univ. Philadelphia. Many 

 of Bartram's dried plants are in the Herbarium of the British Museum ; also 

 four lists in Solander's hand of 308 specimens sent by Bartram to the king 

 in 1765-66, from Georgia, Carolina and East Florida ; and his original 

 specimens of Dioncza muscipula, Venus's Fly-trap, on which the descriptions 

 by Solander and Ellis were based. 



Bartram had some insight into geology, for he wrote of the formation of 

 the savannahs, and he perceived that the mountains were long covered by 

 sea, before the earth was habitable. MS. Letters, Brit. Mus. Herbar. ; also 

 Sloane MSS. In 1756 he proposed a scheme of systematic borings of the 

 ground to a great depth at various places, in order to find different soils, salt, 

 coal, springs of water, etc., and thus to " compose a curious subterranean 

 map," Darlington, p. 393. The " Bartram oak," Quercus Heterophylla, 

 with variable leaves, was described by the younger Michaux from a single 

 tree found in Bartram's meadow, and has been a source of some contention 

 to botanists. It is now generally accounted a hybrid of Q. Phellos, L. See 

 Notes on the Bartram Oak, by I. C. Martindale, Camden, N.J., 1880 ; Prof. 

 Sargent, Silva of North America, viii. 180. The tree now in Bartram's garden 

 is Q. Phellos, and belongs to a later date, but a seedling of the older tree was 

 planted by Marshall in his Arboretum and was living in 1895. A portrait in 

 oils, believed to be of Bartram, is in the possession of the Pennsylvania Horti- 

 cultural Society. A gold medal was sent to Bartram in 1772 by a Society 

 of Gentlemen, established at Edinburgh in 1764 for the purpose of importing 

 seeds of useful trees' and shrubs (Darlington, p"p. 405, 434, 436). The present 

 writer is indebted for references, etc., to Frank M. Bartram, Kennett Square, 

 Pa., and to Mrs. Joel Cadbury, Moorestown, N.J., both lineal descendants of 

 the botanist ; also to Miss Carlotta Herring-Browne of Philadelphia, who has 

 made untiring researches in many quarters for information on John Bartram, 

 and will shortly publish his Life. 



