22 
In 1715 he returned to England and “in pursuance of the 
main object, probably, of his visit to his native land,” he went to 
Scotland, where, in November of the same year, he married Alice 
Christy. The following year saw them both in Philadelphia, and 
in 1718, accepting the offer from Governor Hunter of a position 
as master in chancery and surveyor-general, Dr. Colden fixed 
his residence in New York. 
In 1719 a patent for 2,000 acres of land situated in Ulster 
County was issued to him, and shortly after he procured another 
thousand acres adjoining the first, and to this manor he gave the 
name of “ Coldengham,” still known to-day as Coldenham, in the 
town of Montgomery, Orange County.* 
The details of his active life are too well known to be recounted 
here. Suffice it to say that about this time Governor Hunter 
offered him a small stipend for the compilation of a list of the 
plants and animals of New York. This work was to be pursued 
on his surveys, but, owing to extensive cutting down of expendi- 
tures in the province, it was not carried out. As regards the 
flora of the state as a whole, this was only accomplished nearly 
a hundred years later with the publication in 1814 by Jacob Green 
of his ‘‘ Catalogue of the Plants Indigenous to the State of New 
York,” and later by the more complete and detailed works of John 
Torrey, published 1840-43. 
In 1728 Dr. Colden with his wife and six young children fe 
moved to Coldengham, being led thereto among other reasons 
“to secure in the —then wilderness abode that leisure for philo- 
sophical study to which he was so much inclined.” 
It was during his residence there for more than thirty years 
that he maintained a most voluminous correspondence with . 
number of learned men in Europe. In the intervals of political 
and literary pursuits he devoted himself to the reclamation and 
cultivation of his estate, and, with his accomplished wife, to the 
education of their children. It was here that he wrote that first 
of “local floras” of New York, the “ Plantae Coldenghamiae, 
eventually published by Linnaeus, with whom he had been 1? 
New 
Purple, E, R. Genealogical Notes of the Colden Family in America. 
York ; privately printed, 1873. 
