14 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



be consciously aware of himself as part of a world-wide intel- 

 lectual movement, but there can be no doubt that his father was 

 an active agent in that movement. A member of the American 

 Philosophical Society, an intimate friend of Benjamin Franklin, 

 who addressed him in his letters " My ever dear friend " and 

 " My good and dear friend," ^^ John Bartram surely was 

 acquainted with the current thought then beginning to stir in 

 America. There is a Rousseauistic defiance in his insistence on 

 independence of thought and action. He was religious, but his 

 views were liberal. " Indeed," he wrote to Peter Collinson, " I 

 have little respect to apologies and disputes about the ceremo- 

 nial parts of religion, which often introduce animosities, con- 

 fusion, and disorder in the mind — and sometimes body too ; but, 

 dear Peter, let us worship the one Almighty Power, . . . doing 

 to others as we would have them do to us, if we were in their 

 circumstances. Living in love and innocency, we may die in 

 hope." '^ Above his study window he inscribed: 



It is God Alone, Almyty Lord, 

 The Holy One by Me Ador'd 

 John Bartram 1770 



and over the door of his greenhouse: 



Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, 

 But looks through Nature, up to Nature's God.^* 



These deistic sentiments led to his being, in 1758, read out of 

 the Monthly Meeting at Darby. John Bartram, farmer or 

 naturalist, was a man of/ keen intellectual interests, who "' seldom 

 sat at his meals without his book; often his victuals in one hand 

 and his book in the other." " 



Such a father could not fail to transmit to his son part of his 

 own enthusiasm for ideas. William's work, original as it is, 



^^ William Cabell Bruce, Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed. New York, 1917 

 I, 334. 



"Letter dated July 6, 1742. Memorials, p. 159. Also quoted by Middleton, 

 "John Bartram, Botanist." The Scientific Monthly, XXI, 214. 



"Middleton, op. cit., 214. 



^^ American Philosophical Society Pamphlet v. 1166. 



