40 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



Bartram himself. Genuine scientific interest in nature was well- 

 developed when William Bartram published his Travels. 



Yet the statement made by Mr. Hicks as to the pioneering 

 significance of William Bartram' s work is true nevertheless. The 

 four elements Bartram is said to have introduced were new to 

 American nature literature, even though they did not originate 

 with Bartram. They were popular currents in eighteenth- 

 century European thought and literature. Along with the devel- 

 opment of a scientific interest in nature there is perceptible a 

 growing aesthetic appreciation of nature. Catesby's Natural 

 History was preceded by Pope's Windsor Forest, the nature 

 poems of Lady Winchelsea, and by Thomson's Seasons. The 

 "belief in the immanence of the creative principle in nature" 

 as well as "compassion for the suffering of the lower order" 

 can both be found in the Deists and particularly in Lord 

 Shaftesbury, who claimed "that the Deity is sufficiently revealed 

 through natural phenomena "^^ and that "compassion is the 

 supreme form of moral beauty, the neglect of it is the greatest 

 of all offenses against nature's ordained harmony." " It is in 

 the expression of these concepts of nature as modified and col- 

 ored by his own temperament and personality that Bartram' s 

 originality lay. 



There can be no question of any philosophy of nature in 

 Bartram' s scientific cataloguing of meteorological and seasonal 

 phenomena, mere commonplace reporting of observations, such 

 as the keeping of a calendar which many members of the Ameri- 

 can Philosophical Society, including Thomas Jefferson, indulged 

 in, as part of a cooperative undertaking. In such a work as his 

 Manuscript Diary, 1802-1822,^^ Bartram could be terse and ob- 

 jective, an uncritical recorder of changes in temperature, bird 

 migrations, the flowering of plants, the appearances and dis- 

 appearances of insects, interspersed with news items: 



1802 

 March 20. ... a flock of geese returning to the north. 



22. ... kingfisher arrived today from the southward. . . . 



^^ C. E. Moore, " Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England." PMLA, 

 XXXI (1916), 267. Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, 

 and Times was published in 1711. 



^* Moore, op. cit., 271. ^^ In the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. 



