WILLIAM STARLING SULLIVANT. 371 



newly settled country, and least of all by those who have pos- 

 sessions. Mr. Sullivant must have reached the age of nearly 

 thirty years, and, having married early, 1 was established in 

 his suburban residence in a rich floral district, before his taste 

 for natural history was at all developed. His brother Joseph, 

 next in age, was already somewhat proficient in botany as well 

 as in conchology and ornithology ; and when in some way his 

 own interest in the subject was at length excited, he took it 

 up with characteristic determination to know well whatever 

 he undertook to know at all. He collected and carefully 

 studied the plants of the central part of Ohio, made neat 

 sketches of the minuter parts of many of them, especially of 

 the Grasses and Sedges, entered into communication with the 

 leading botanists of the country, and in 1840 he published 

 " A Catalogue of Plants, Native or Naturalized, in the vicinity 

 of Columbus, Ohio," (pp. 63,) to which he added a few pages 

 of valuable notes. His only other direct publication in Phae- 

 nogamous botany is a short article upon three new plants which 

 he had discovered in that district, contributed to the " Ameri- 

 can Journal of Science and Arts," in the year 1842. The 

 observations which he continued to make were communicated 

 to his correspondents and friends, the authors of the Flora of 

 North America, then in progress. As soon as the flowering 

 plants of his district had ceased to afford him novelty, he 

 turned to the Mosses, in which he found abundant scientific 

 occupation, of a kind well suited to his bent for patient and 

 close observation, scrupulous accuracy, and nice discrimina- 

 tion. His first publication in his chosen department, the 

 " Musci Alleghanienses," was accompanied by the specimens 

 themselves of Mosses and Hepaticce collected in a botanical 

 expedition through the Alleghany Mountains from Maryland 

 to Georgia, in the summer of 1843, the writer of this notice 

 being his companion. The specimens were not only criti- 

 cally determined, but exquisitely prepared and mounted, and 

 with letter-press of great perfection ; the whole forming two 

 quarto volumes, which well deserve the encomium bestowed 



1 His first wife, Jane Marshall of Kentucky, was a niece of Chief 

 Justice Marshall. She died a few years after marriage. 



