JOHN BARTRAM 51 



edition of Short's Medicina Britannica, pub- 

 lished by Benjamin Franklin in 1751. 



Haller, in his Blbliotheca Anatomica, speaks 

 of him as a physician, and certainly he devoted 

 much of his time to physic and surgery, obtaining 

 some celebrity in the latter. He bought for his 

 botanical garden a piece of land about three miles 

 from Philadelphia on the Schuylkill, and built a 

 house there with his own hands. He employed 

 much of his time in specimen hunting and natural 

 history research, no dangers deterring him. A 

 modern explorer with an air bed, camp furniture, 

 collapsible tent (and hopes) is a pigmy, con- 

 trasted with this John setting out when seventy 

 years old from Philadelphia to explore in 

 Florida. This was before the days of Govern- 

 mental Commissions, and Bartram paid his own 

 expenses. When he had gathered a large natural 

 history collection, one of his friends Joseph 

 Breintnall, a Philadelphia merchant undertook 

 to convey some to the botanist, Peter Collinson, 1 

 in London; and it was chiefly through Collinson 

 that Bartram found correspondents throughout 

 Europe and became a member of the Royal 

 Society in London and in Stockholm. Collinson 

 says in one of his letters : 



1 Peter Collinson, 1693-1768 (Collinsonia Canadensis. Linnaeus). 



