John J. Crooke: a Staten Island Naturalist^ 



William T. Davis. 



Mr. John J. Crooke died April 22, 191 1, at his home, which 

 overlooks Great Kill, Staten Island, and was buried at Pough- 

 keepsie, N. Y. He was born January 22, 1824. at Stuyvesant, 

 Columbia Co., N. Y., on the banks of the Hudson, not far north 

 of the place where he was buried. Long ago he came to Staten 

 Island and purchased a large tract of land on the " south side," in- 

 cluding the one-time point, but now an island, that bears his name. 

 He has told the writer that when he first came to the island there 

 was a forest over much of his land. He made the clearing for 

 the house and had a 'fire-proof room built with brick-arched ceil- 

 ing and iron doors for his natural history collections. Some of 

 these collections were acquired by purchase, and they included 

 the ]\Ieisner herbarium and the Chapman herbarium of southern 

 plants, which were given to Columbia College and finally found 

 a resting place in the New York Botanical Garden. They in- 

 cluded also a large collection of land shells, now the property of 

 the American Museum of Natural History, and many minerals 

 and other objects collected during his extended travels in Colo- 

 rado and the west, where at one time he owned silver mines. 



The writer made several visits to this living room and museum, 

 where cases of birds, plants, and other natural history material 

 were numerous, where a specimen of the now probably extinct 

 passenger pigeon sat on top of a bookcase, and where Mr. Crooke 

 had a lathe and other mechanical appliances. He told us that 

 he had made a clock some years before and that it was still run- 

 ning at the time of our visit. There were many pictures of shells 

 about the room, and a medallion of Dr. John Torrey, who with 

 Peter Le Roy, the botanist, had the first care of the botanical col- 



' Presented May 20, 1911. 



169 



