1870. | In North America from 1635 to 1840. 757 
and of Olaf Swartz (1785-1789). Only the latter spent a year on 
the North American continent before he went to the West Indies, 
where he alone discovered and described 850 new species. The 
first came from France, > me second from Germany, the last from 
Sweden. 
At that time Humphrey Marshall made the woody plants his 
special study. He published his “ Arboretum Americanum,” 
containing 276 species, in Philadelphia, 1785, which in 1788 was 
republished in Germany. The German foresters took a special 
interest in the matter, as many American woody plants had 
already found their way into the German nurseries, and by some 
experiments made it was known that for many purposes some 
sorts of American timber were superior to the indigenous, and as 
the greater demand for fuel in some industrial districts resulted in 
a final scarcity of wood, they thought that the cultivation of 
American timber in the German forests would be, by its more’ 
rapid growth, of great advantage. 
Captain’ Wangenheim, of the Hessian troops, afterwards Prus- 
sian forest-officer, studied, during his eight years service in 
America, the timber of this country with regard to its usefulness 
and practicability of culture. In 1781 he published descriptions 
of some North American trees, and after his return to Germany 
a larger work with drawings, 1787. There are many good obser- 
vations on the soil and climate and their influence upon the cul- 
ture of the different species, but the drawings are inferior, and in 
one there is a great error which is worthy of notice. On plate 
18 is figured the leaf of Carya oliveformis and what is intended 
to represent its fruit, but looks rather like a pea nut. Probably 
he had never seen the nut, which he described as “kidney 
shaped,” though he examined, in Wm. Prince’s nursery at Flush- 
ing, on Long Island, the young tree not yet bearing. As he was 
eager to obtain the fruit, somebody by mistake, or perhaps for 
jest, may have given to him a pea nut for a pecan nut, which he 
drew. He gives a short history of the tree, which was unknown 
in the English colonies until the peace of 1762, when by chance 
some fur-traders brought a small number of the nuts to New 
York. Wm. Prince planted (1772) thirty nuts and raised ten 
plants, which (except two retained for propagation) he sold to 
England at ten guineas a piece. 
1 Here may be corrected an error in the preface of Torrey’s Flora of New York, 
Wangenheim was not a surgeon nor an M. 
