1 6 3osscl2tt as a Botanist. 



England. " The plants in New England," he fays in his 

 "Voyages," p. 59, "for the variety, number, beauty, and 

 virtues, may ftand in competition with the plants of any 

 countrey in Europe. Johnfon hath added to Gerard's 

 * Herbal ' three hundred, and Parkinfon. mentioneth many 

 more. Had they been in New England, they might have 

 found a thoufand, at leaft, never heard of nor feen by any 

 Englishman before." : Nor did our author fail to adorn 

 his " Rarities " with recognizable figures, as well as de- 

 fcriptions, of fome of thefe new American plants; and 



1 Mention of New-England plants may be found in earlier writers than Cor- 

 nuti or Josselyn; but what is said is now rarely available. Gosnold's expedition 

 was in 1602 ; and the writer of the account of it tells us that the island upon 

 which his party proposed to settle (Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands) was 

 covered with " oaks, ashes, beech, walnut, witch-hazel, sassafrage, and cedars, 

 with divers others of unknown names;" beside "wild pease, young sassafrage, 

 cherry-trees, vines, eglantine, gooseberry-bushes, hawthorn, honeysuckles, with 

 others of the like quality; " as also "strawberries, rasps, ground-nuts, alexander, 

 surrin, tansy, &c, without count." — Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. xxviii. p. 76. And so 

 ' the writer of Mourt's Relation, in 1620, speaks of " sorrel, yarrow, carvel, brook- 

 lime, liverwort, watercresses, &c, as noticed, " in winter," however, at Plymouth. 

 — Hist. Coll. vol. viii. p. 221. There is much here which is true enough, though 

 the " eglantine " of the first writer is an evident mistake, as doubtless also the 

 "carvel" of the other; but we have no reason to suppose that either of. these 

 passages ever had any scientific value. Josselyn, so far as his Botany goes, does 

 not belong to this class of writers. There are important parts of his account of 

 our plants, in which we know with certainty what he intended to tell us ; and, 

 farther, that this was worth the telling. And the credit which fairly belongs to 

 the new genera of American plants, in some sort indicated by him, shall illustrate 

 as well those other portions of his work where what he meant is a matter 

 rather of deduction from his particulars, such as they are, in the light of his only 

 here-and-there-cited authorities, than of plain faft. His English names — com- 

 mon, and perhaps often indefinite, as they strike us — had more of scientific 

 value, in botanical hands at least, when he wrote, than now ; and, there is good 

 reason to suppose, were meant to indicate that the plants intended, or in some 

 cases the genera to which they belonged, were the same with those published, 

 under the same names, by Gerard, Johnson, and Parkinson. 



