SKETCH OF BENJAMIN SMITH BARTON. 835 



of Nature and in criticising the illustrations prepared by others 

 for his books. He is said to have maintained that "no man 

 could become a nice, discriminating, and eminent botanist with- 

 out possessing that acumen in perception of proportion, color, 

 harmony of design, and obscure differences in the objects of the 

 vegetable world which alone belong to the eye of a painter." 

 He insisted on strict accuracy in details that even most careful 

 naturalists would disregard. To mention an extreme instance 

 of his exactness, he had every protuberance on the back, tail, and 

 legs of a horned lizard counted, and required the precise number 

 found to be represented in the drawing made for him. 



In the spring of 1780 Benjamin, with one of his brothers, 

 was placed in an academy at York, Pa., where he remained 

 nearly two years, pursuing a course of classical study. When 

 he was sixteen years of age his elder brother, who was living in 

 Philadelphia, took him into his family, where he remained 

 about four years. During this period he attended for a time the 

 College of Philadelphia, and afterward, at the beginning of his 

 eighteenth year, took up the study of medicine under Dr. William 

 Shippen. 



In the summer of 1785 he accompanied the commission, of 

 which his uncle, Mr. Rittenhouse, was a member, that was en- 

 gaged in running the western boundary line of Pennsylvania. 

 Young Barton was absent from Philadelphia five months, and it 

 was on this expedition that he gained his first acquaintance with 

 the Indians and began his researches into their medicines and 

 pathology, their general customs and history, which received a 

 share of his attention for the rest of his life. 



In order to obtain a thorough medical training it was at that 

 time necessary to go abroad. Accordingly, young Barton re- 

 paired to Edinburgh in the autumn of 1786, where he studied for 

 two years, with the exception of a few months spent in London. 

 Having become a member of the Royal Medical Society at Edin- 

 burgh, he won the Harveian prize of that association for a disser- 

 tation on the Hyoscyamus niger of Linnaeus (black henbane). 

 Barton's first book was issued while he was in London, in the 

 early part of 1787. It was a little pamphlet, entitled Observations 

 on some Parts of Natural History : to which is prefixed an Ac- 

 count of some Considerable Vestiges of an Ancient Date, which 

 have been discovered in Different Parts of North America. Con- 

 sidering his youth he was only twenty-one years of age and 

 the fact that he was afflicted with ill health when he wrote it, 

 this production is very creditable; but it contained some ill- 

 founded theories and other crudities that he readily and candidly 

 acknowledged only a few months later. For a number of reasons 

 among them the failure of two professors to show him courte- 



