1879 ] Zn North America from 1635 to 1840. 763 
The German botanist, Frederick Pursh, came to North America 
in 1799, a young man then, but not as young as he is made in 
Pritzel’s Thesaurus, which, on account ofso many errors in print- 
ing, is, in regard to dates, unreliable. According to Pritzel, he 
was born in 1794! What a young botanist, crossing the Atlan- 
tic, five years old! He was born in 1774. 
“My first object after my arrival in America,” he says in the 
preface to his Flora, “ was to form an acquaintance with all those 
interested in the study of botany. Among these I had the pleas- 
ure to account one of the earliest, and, ever after, the most valu- 
able, the Rev. Dr. Muhlenberg, of Lankaster, Pa., a gentleman 
whose industry and zeal for the science can only be surpassed by 
the accuracy and acuteness of his observations. 
Heinrich Ludwig Mihlenberg, born 1756, was a Lutheran 
preacher in Lancaster, Pa., where he died, 1817. He published a 
catalogue of North American plants, 1813 (second edition 1818), 
and a “ Description of North American Grasses,” 1817. 
Then Pursh visited Mr. Humphrey Marshall, already men- 
tioned, the younger John Bartram and his brother William Bar- 
tram; Mr. John Lyon, who had the management of Mr. William 
Hamilton's gardens, and whose successor he was from 1802 to 
1805, and Dr. Benjamin S. Barton, Professor of Botany in the 
University of Pennsylvania, who lived from 1766 to 1815, the 
= author of “ Collections for an Essay toward a Materia Medica of 
the United States,” 1798 (second edition 1812-1814); of a “Flora 
Virginica,” first part, 1812, but not continued, and of “ Geographi- 
cal view of trees and shrubs,” 1809. 
In 1805, Pursh set out for the Alleghanies of Virginia and 
Maryland ; in 1806 he went to the Northern States, as far as New 
_ Hampshire ; in 1807 he took charge of Professor Hosack’s botani- 
cal garden of New York; in 1810 he visited the West Indian — 
islands, and returning in 181 1, landed in Maine, and embarked 
the same year in New York for England, where he published his 
Flora Americe Septentrionalis, London, 1814, in 2 vols., with 
24 engravings. This Flora contains about 740 genera and Reavis 
3000 species. 
It will be easily understood that Pursh’s F lora, which was pub- 
lished eleven years after Michaux’s, must be richer in genera and 
Species, when we consider that Michaux described only such spe- 
cies as he collected himself, and that Pursh received contribu- 
VOL, X11I,—NO, XII. 51 
