John Torrey. 415 
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 plants collected, arranged under their 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 Rocky Mountains, if we except a few plants col- 
lected early in the century by Lewis and Clark, where they 
crossed them many degrees farther north, and which are re- 
corded 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 Intro- 
duction to the Natural 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 investi- 
gation of the United States species of the vast genus Carea, 
Which has ever since been a favorite study in this country. 
His friend, von Schweinitz, of Bethlehem, Penn., placed in his 
hands and desired him to edit, during the author’s absence in 
Europe, his Monograph of North American Carices. It was 
published in the Annals of the New York Lyceum, in 1825, 
much’ extended, indeed almost wholly rewritten, and so much 
to Schweinitz’s satisfaction that he insisted that this classical 
Monograph “should be considered and quoted in all respects 
as the joint production of Dr. Torrey and himself.” Ten or 
eleven years later, in the succeeding volume of the Annals of 
the New York Lyceum, appeared Dr. Torrey’s elaborate Mono- 
graph of the other North American Cyperacee, with an 
appended revision of the Carices, which meanwhile had been 
immensely increased by the collections of Richardson, Drum- 
mond, &c., in British and Arctic America. A full set of these 
was consigned to his hands for study (along with other import- 
ant collections), by his friend Sir Wm. Hooker, upon the ocea- 
sion of a visit which he made to Europe in 1833. But Dr. 
Torrey generously turned over the Carices to the late Pro- 
fessor Dewey, whose rival Caricography is scattered through 
forty or fifty volumes of the American Journal of Science and 
Arts; and so had only to sum up the results in this regard, and 
