76 MODERN TREATMENT OF ASTER 
AMERICAN WORK UPON BIOTIAN ASTERS 
Biotian Asters were rather slow to make their appearance in 
writings about American plants. Their region of principal growth, 
and the scope of the work accomplished, made it less remarkable 
that they failed to appear in the work of Thevet, 1558, on French 
America ; or in that of Monardes, 1596, on Spanish America; or 
in the works of Catesby, 1731+, and the less extensive ones of 
Brickell, 1737, and Walter, 1788, on the Carolinas. 
But it was remarkable that Cornut, 1635, writing of the plants 
of Canada, made no mention of them; they would not have been 
left unmentioned surely, had he himself visited America. That 
Josselyn, in his New England Rarities, 1672, said nothing of them, 
does not perhaps indicate that he did not observe them; for he 
had a keener interest in plants of unfamiliar shape, like the 
Impatiens, which he took pains to figure. That Cadwallader 
Colden, in his Plants of New York, 1743-1750, did not mention 
them, was due to his total failure to complete his catalog, as it ex- 
tends but through the first 12 Linnaean classes. Meanwhile plants 
of A. macrophyllus had been noticed and had been sent abroad to 
France and to England not far from the same time by Sarrasin 
from Quebec to Vaillant at Paris shortly before 1720, and by 
some one in the British colonies to Philip Miller, 1733-1739. 
Aster Claytont followed early, perhaps in 1754, from Clayton’s col- 
lections in mountains of Virginia ; and a little earlier, from Collin- 
son or some other source, specimens of A. divaricatus reached 
Linnaeus, to receive their well-known mingling with Doe/Zzgeria 
infirma in his description of 1753. 
With that century’s close Manasseh Cutler, who must have 
been familiar with several Biotian forms abundant in northeastern 
Massachusetts, seems to have been endeavoring in vain to fit 
European descriptions to them. Others succeeded little better ; 
as Michaux, who was mingling together the heart-leaved A. cordi- 
folitus and A. divaricatus. 
Rafinesque, in 1807, had begun, he remarks, “to reform” * 
the Asters, saying that “ Solidago, with Erigeron, Inula and Aster, 
were in utter confusion, the determination of species hardly attain- 
* Rafinesque, Flora Telluriana, 2: 41. 1836. 
