LIFE AND LABORS OF PEOF. JOHN TORREY. 213 



appreciate its value aud influence. It was tlie fruit of those few but 

 precious years which, seasoned with pecuniary privation, are in this 

 country not rarely vouchsafed to an investigator, in which to pi^ove his 

 quality before he is haply overwhelmed with professional or professorial 

 labors aud duties. 



In 1824, the year in which the first volume (or nearly half) of his Flora 

 was published, he married Miss Eliza Robinson Shaw, of ISTew York, aud 

 was established at West Point, having been chosen professor of chem- 

 istry, mineralogy, and geology in the United States Military Academy. 

 Three years later he exchanged this chair for that of chemistry and 

 botany (practically that of chemistry only, for botany had already been 

 allowed to fall out of the medical curriculum in this country) in the Col- 

 lege of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, then in Barclay street. 

 The Flora of the Northern States was never carried further, although 

 a "Compendium," a pocket-volume for the field, containing brief char- 

 acters of the species which were to have been described in the second 

 volume, along with an abridgment of the contents of the first, was 

 issued in 1826, Moreover, long before Dr. Torrey could find time to go 

 on with the work, he foresaw that the natural system was not much 

 longer to remain, here and in England, an esoteric doctrine, confined 

 to profound botanists, but was destined to come into general use, and to 

 change the character of botanical instruction. He was himself the first 

 to apply it in this country in any considerable publication. 



The opportunity for this, and for extending his investigations to the 

 Great Plains and the Eocky Mountains on their western boundary, was 

 furnished by the collections placed in Dr. Torrey's hands by Dr. Edwin 

 James, the botanist of Major Long's expedition in 1820. This expedi- 

 tion skirted the Eocky Mountains belonging to what is now called 

 Colorado Territory, where Dr. James, first and alone, reached the charm- 

 ing alpine vegetation, scaling one of the very highest summits, which 

 from that time and for many years afterward was api^ropriately named 

 James's Peak ; although it is now called Pike's Peak, in honor of Gen- 

 eral Pike, who long before had probably seen but had not reached it. 



As early as the year 1823, Dr. Torrey communicated to the Lyceum 

 of Natural History descriptions of some new species of James's collection, 

 and in 1826 an extended account of all the j)lauts collected, arranged under 

 the natural orders. This is the earliest treatise of the sort in this country, 

 arranged upon the natural system ; and with it begins the history of the 

 botany of the Eocky Mountains, if we except a few plants collected early 

 in the century by Lewis and Clark, where they crossed them many de- 

 grees farther north, and which, are recorded in Pursh's Flora. The next 

 step in the direction he was aiming was made in the year 1831, when he 

 superintended an American reprint of the first edition of Lindley's In- 

 troduction to the Natiu'al System of Botany, and appended a catalogue 

 of the North American genera arranged according to it. 



Dr. Torrey took an early and prominent part in the investigation of 



