(320) 
More common is the statement, unknown, so far as I can 
find, for forty years after the gift to Columbia, that the grant 
of the Garden to her in 1814 was made asa ‘‘ rermburse- 
ment” or ** compensation ” to Columbia for her lands in Ver- 
mont, ‘* ceded” by New York to that State by the treaty of 
1790.* It has even been called an ‘* exchange.” ¢ 
These expressions, I think, are all misconceptions having 
no valid basis. It is desirable that the facts derived from 
records and documents bearing on these points should be 
brought together, both from their inherent interest and their 
connection with a striking episode in our colonial and revo- 
lutionary history. 
Something, however, should be premised of the eminent 
man by whom the Elgin Garden was founded. His father, 
Alexander Hosack, was born at Elgin (for which the garden 
was named) in Scotland, in 1736. In 1758 he came with 
Gen. Jeffrey Amherst, as an artillery officer, to the siege and 
capture of Louisberg, and afterward settled in New York, 
where he married Jane, daughter of Francis Arden, a promi- 
nent New York merchant. David Hosack was their oldest 
son, born August 31, 1769. He was for two and one half 
years a pupil of Columbia, but completed his college course 
in 1789 at Princeton. 
He received his medical degrees at the University of Penn- 
sylvania in 1791, and at Edinburgh in 1793, studying there 
and in London from 1792 to 1794, where he met many sci- 
entific men. 
«‘One day,” he writes, ‘* while walking in the garden of 
Prof. Hamilton, near Edinburgh, I was very much mortified 
by my ignorance of botany, with which his other guests were 
familiar, and I resolved to acquire a knowledge of that de- 
partment of science.” t 
He was soon pursuing botany diligently under Curtis in 
his botanical garden at Brompton, and afterwards with Sir 
* New Internat. Encycl., 5: 49. 1903; Van Amringe, Hist. Columbia Col., 
67. 1876. 
: t aehaen Univ. Quart., 5: 279. 1903; King’s Handbook of N. Y., 272. 
1893. 
on A. E. Hosack in Gross’ Amer. Med. Biog., 1: 297, 298. 1860. 
