34 Biology in America 



another was (liffifult, owinj; to the selfish Jack Horner policy 

 of keopiiifi: all the ])liiins at home. Jefferson however visited 

 Italy and carrie<l off: successfully some pockets full of rice, 

 which he sent to tlie Charleston planters, and from which 

 have develop(Hl the rice crops of the South today. 



Among Jeil'erson's important contrihutions to biology were 

 his discovery of the remains of a giant sloth in the mountains 

 of Virginia, which bears his name and which is mentioned 

 elsewhere in this book ; his discovery of the bones of the 

 mastodon in Ulster County, N. Y., and his account of the nat- 

 ural history of Virginia, published in his notes on that state. 



In 1810 an expedition fitted out by John Jacob Astor set 

 out for the Columbia, which reached the infant village of 

 Astoria near its mouth on February 15, 1812, after suffering 

 untold hardships in the wilderness. On this expedition were 

 two naturalists, both Englishmen; one, John Bradbury sent 

 out by the Botanical Society of Liverpool to collect American 

 plants; and the other, Thomas Nuttall, the ornithologist, and 

 botanist, who was traveling independently. They accom- 

 panied it for several hundred miles above St. Louis, but 

 returned before the main party crossed the Rocky Mountains. 

 Later Bradbury visited several of the central western states, 

 the results of all his journeys being interestingly recorded in 

 his "Travels in the Interior of America." Nuttall 's travels 

 also took him along the shores of the Great Lakes into Wis- 

 consin, down the Mississippi to St. Louis, up the Arkansas 

 River and finally in company with the naturalist Townsend, 

 across the continent to the Columbia, whence he returned 

 east by the Hawaiian Islands and Cape Horn. On this expedi- 

 tion they traveled with the party of Mr. Nathaniel J. Wyeth 

 of Boston, who in 1833 made a well conceived but ineffectual 

 attempt to recover for the United States the trade lost when, 

 twenty years previously, Astoria passed into the hands of the 

 "Northwest Company," a Canadian company and rival of the 

 "Hudson Bay Company" for the trade of the Northwest. 



In 1819-20 Major Stephen H. Long, from whom one of the 

 most inspiring peaks in the Rocky Mountains takes its name, 

 made an expedition under the direction of the War Depart- 

 ment to the Rocky Mountains. He was accompanied on this 

 expedition by Thomas Say, the conchologist and entomologist, 

 and Edwin James, a botanist and geologist. Say also accom- 

 panied Long on his survey of the Great Lakes region and the 

 valleys of the upper Mississippi and Red River as far as Lake 

 Winnipeg. 



The life of the far West in the days when the pioneers blazed 

 their trails for civilization and science through its wildernesses, 

 was one to appeal to the hardy and adventurous. Its virgin 



