JANE COLDEN, AN EARLY NEW YORK BOTANIST 
By ANNA MurRAY VAIL 
A few years ago Mr. James Britten published in the Journal 
of Botany (33: 12. 1895) asketch of the life of Miss Jane Col- 
den, with a description of her MS. Flora of New York, which is 
preserved in the Department of Botany of the British Museum. 
This sketch was compiled from the numerous, but all too frag- 
mentary, references to Miss Colden that are scattered through 
her father’s correspondence and elsewhere in biographies of the 
period, and is most entertaining reading. 
It is with the object of adding a few more facts to those col- 
lected by Mr. Britten, as well as to make known something 
about the first botanist of her sex in the state, that these notes 
are offered to the Club. 
Jane, the second daughter of Lieutenant-Governor Cadwallader 
Colden, was born in New York, March 27th, 1724. Her father 
Was the son of the Rev. Alexander Colden, minister of Dunse, 
in the Merse Berwickshire, Scotland. He received his education 
at the University of Edinburgh, with a view to entering the 
Church of Scotland, but, his tastes turning in other directions, 
he devoted himself to the study of medicine. Owing to limited 
means, his father was unable to assist him. in starting a career at" 
home, so he came to this country ‘in 1710 to try his fortune in 
America, as he himself puts it in a letter to Kalm. Here he 
Settled in Philadelphia, residing with a widowed sister of his 
mother’s, who had established herself there, and began the prac- 
lice of his profession. That his affairs did not prosper to his 
Satisfaction or that he had a taste for adventure is evinced by the 
fact that we hear of him as trading in the colonies and in the 
"est Indies. 
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