14 INTRODUCTION 



Men in Europe, hearing of the wonderful 

 America where plants, all unnoticed, were grow- 

 ing and blowing and dying and living again, 

 ventured upon a journey fraught with peril and 

 discomfort to discover these treasures for them- 

 selves. Thus, Dr. John Mitchell, who came in 

 the early part of the eighteenth century, was able 

 to send Collinson " a paper in which thirty new 

 genera of Virginia plants were proposed," while 

 Peter Kalm, a Swedish naturalist, was spending 

 three years in Pennsylvania and the neighboring 

 states investigating, and, in 1753, publishing his 

 Travels in North America. Dr. Alex Garden, 

 another European, practising in South Carolina, 

 had begun his long and useful correspondence 

 and exchange with Linnaeus and other leading 

 botanists. Dr. Adam Kuhn, of Philadelphia, 

 was probably the first professor of botany in 

 America (appointed 1768), and Humphry Mar- 

 shall founded the second botanic garden, 1773, 

 in West Bradford, Pennsylvania. His Arbustum 

 Americanum (on title-page erroneously " Arbus- 

 trum "), published in 1785, is our first botanical 

 work by a native American. I own a first 

 edition of this in its stout grey paper cover 

 and with its long title, and a note on the 

 last page saying that " Boxes of seeds and grow- 

 ing plants .... are made up in the best manner 

 and at a reasonable rate by the Author." 



