1879. | In North America from 1635 to 1840. 769 
Capt. Beechey to the Pacific, 1825-1828, were described by Sir 
Wm. Jackson Hooker and G. A. Walker-Arnott, and published 
in London, 1841, a quarto volume with ninety-four plates. A 
part of these plants were collected in California. 
Carl Heinrich Mertens, born in Bremen, 1796, took part in the 
Russian expedition under the command of Capt. Lütke, 1826-1829. 
Amongst his collections was a number of plants from the Island 
of Sitka, which, as Mertens not long after his return died in St. 
Petersburg, were described by Bongard in the memoirs of the 
Academy of Science of St. Petersburg, 1832. His account of 
the vegetation of Sitka was already published, 1827, in Berlin, by 
A. Chamisso, with observations of the same. 
A member of the same expedition was F. H. v. Kittlitz, who 
published twenty-four fine landscape views of the Pacific islands 
and coasts, amongst which are four that give a good idea of the 
vegetative character of Alaska. Three of them are rather roughly 
copied in the U. S. Agricultural Report for 1868. 
David Douglas, born in Scotland, 1790, traveled for the Hor- 
ticultural Society of London. He arrived in July, 1823, in New 
York, made excursions through New York State to Canada, and 
returned to London 1824. The society was so well pleased with 
his collection that he was sent the same year to Oregon, where 
he arrived in February, 1825, on the same ship with Dr. John 
Scouler, another Scotchman, who was afterwards professor in 
Dublin, and died, seventy-two years old, in 1874, in Glasgow, his 
birthplace. Douglas took up his residence in Fort Vancouver, 
and made from there excursions into the interior of Oregon Ter- 
ritory, and to Northern California, then he crossed the Rocky 
mountains to the Athabasca river, and to York Factory on the shore 
of Hudson's bay. In October, 1827, he returned to England. In 
1830 he undertook his second voyage to Oregon and Upper Cali- 
fornia, and in 1833 he crossed the Pacific to the Sandwich islands, 
where he lost his life in a horrible manner. It was on the 12th — 
of July, 1834, that on an excursion he fell into a deep excavation 
made for the purpose of capturing wild beasts ; a wild ox, plung- 
ing soon after him into the same hole, killed him. This was 
a time of disaster for traveling botanists. A year before Douglas, 
in February, 1833, Thomas Drummond died in Havana; two 
months only after Douglas, was Carl Beyrich taken away by the 
cholera at Fort Gibson, the next year Joseph Frank died in New 
