INTRODUCTION. 
165 
All artists and amateurs in our country concede the palm to Peter Yanderlyn, 
among whose performances will be remembered his “ Ariadne ” and his “ Wash- 
ington.” 
Music was long since admitted in every plan of female education; but owing 
to a strange perverseness, has been almost universally neglected in the education 
of the other sex. Just sentiments, however, are beginning to prevail. Ele¬ 
mentary instruction is now given in many of our primary schools, and it may 
reasonably be hoped that soon there will be none in which this tasteful and refining 
art will be omitted. 
It remains to notice the progress of the physical sciences. The notes on these 
subjects will be the more brief, because they are fully investigated in the work 
which follows this introduction. 
The earliest publication relating to the botany of New-York, was Cadwallader 
Colden’s account of the indigenous plants of Orange county and its vicinity, 
published in 1744. It is contained in the “Acta Societatis Regiae Scientiarum 
Upsaliensis,” and fills two quarto volumes. The catalogue embraced several 
hundred species, which were carefully described. The “ Plantas Coldenhamiae ” 
were frequently quoted by Linnteus. The traveller Ivalm, who visited this 
country in 1747, under the patronage of the Swedish government, collected a 
large number of plants and transferred them to his preceptor Linnaeus, by which 
distinguished naturalist they were described in the “ Species Plantarum” and 
“ Systema Vegetabilium.” Wangenheim, a Hessian surgeon in the British army, 
during the American revolution, collected many plants in New-York, and in 
other portions of the United States, of which he published accounts in 1781 and 
1787. The Michaux, elder and junior, travelled in New-York in 1792 and in 
1803. The former published in Paris, in 1803, the “ Flora Borealis Americana.” 
The latter, in 1810 and subsequent years, gave a description of our indigenous 
forest trees, in his splendid work entitled “Arbres Forestiers de l’Amerique 
Septentrionale.” C. W. Eddy of New-York, published in the “ Medical Repo¬ 
sitory,” in 1806, a catalogue of the plants growing about Plandome on the 
