72 ESSAYS. 



great interest which he still felt in the advancement and dif- 

 fusion of scientific knowledge in this country, was manifested 

 by his continued and munificent benefactions to the Academy 

 of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia. 1 It was his desire also 

 that some competent person, at his expense, should collect 

 additional information respecting the forest trees of North 

 America, and prepare a new and augmented edition of 

 Michaux's Sylva. Although this generous plan was not car- 

 ried into execution in Mr. Maclure's lifetime, we understand 

 that he left testamentary instructions for its accomplishment, 

 or at least for the reprint of Michaux's original work. 



Mr. Maclure's munificent intentions are — fulfilled, shall 

 we say? by the edition now before us, printed at New Har- 

 mony, Indiana, upon wretched, flimsy, whity-brown paper, of 

 texture scarcely firm enough to receive the impression of the 

 worn-out type, which seems to have done long service in the 

 columns of some country newspaper. The engravings, to do 

 the work full justice, are very good, at least in the colored 

 copies ; being impressions from the original plates imported 

 by Mr. Maclure, and colored after the French edition. The 

 subscription price was high enough to pay for the best typog- 

 raphy and paper ; and so popular a work would surely have 

 found a ready sale at any reasonable price, as the Paris edi- 

 tion had been long out of print. We are bound to suppose 

 that the testamentary instructions of the late Mr. Maclure 

 liave been literally fulfilled. How far his generous inten- 

 tions have been answered, or to what extent defeated, by the 

 wretched character of the reprint, are questions which we 

 shall not attempt to answer, except by stating that, far from 

 having obtained the wide circulation which Mr. Maclure 

 desired, these volumes have entirely disappeared from the 

 shelves of our booksellers, where, so far as we can learn, 



1 Besides his invaluable library of nearly 4000 volumes, containing 

 the choicest works in natural history, antiquities, the fine arts, voyages 

 and travels, etc., and many smaller contributions to this flourishing insti- 

 tution, of which he was president for more than twenty years, Mr. Ma- 

 clure presented to it, in the latter part of his life, the sum of twenty 

 thousand dollars. See Dr. Morton's " Memoir of William Maclure," 

 Philadelphia, 1841. 



