JOURNAL 
€ OF 
The New York. Botanical Garden 
VoL, XXII September, 1922 No. 273 
THE BOTANICAL FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH 
A REcoRD OF EXPLORATION IN FLORIDA IN APRIL 1920 
With Plates 275 and 276 
Designated Snag en nd of the Fountain of Youth—by 
the aborigines of the West Indies in pre jan times, it 
seéms almost the present day traveler in Florida as if the 
country had drunk of her own rejuvenating wa She is old 
She is young. land to lure the expeditioner centuries ago, s. 
Is nd scinating t lorer and i tigator to 
She is still fruitful of things unrecorde is is so, especially 
the investigator ens a botanist h 
territory, botanically, is still terra inc s 
hen th niards were still calling her not Bimini, but Salvagio? 
Sav. : Id Ponce de Leon’s name, 
Florida,? was a happy accident. For ‘ Florida” a is, as if 
we would call her “the beflowered.” 
Ra ‘on the map the State hes a romantic flavor. This is 
1 Name use ed by the West Indian natives to designate a land ga to the 
Nort! them—doubtless Florida—where a fountain, whose waters would 
confer perpetual youth, existed. ter the discovery of. the New World by 
Columbus, the Florida peninsula \ was marked Bimini on some of the early 
ma 
: * Mor re than half a century before the New World became known thr ‘ough 
e 0 nr 
and I in Mar (Bahamas). Doubtless some mariner, driven westward by 
storms, ae sighted these parts of the Western Hemisphere early in the fif- 
teenth c 
3So d by Ponce de Leon because he discovered the land on Easter— 
Pascua ner of the Spanish. 
117 
