NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 81 



from the dean to him. In the first epistle Swift says, "Sometimes Mr. Addison and I 

 steal to a pint of bad wine, and wish for no third person but you ; who, if you were with 

 us, would never be satisfied without three more." In the second letter he says, " I am 

 very much obliged to you for the favour of a kind reproach you sent me in a letter to Mr. 

 Addison, which he never told me of till this day, and that accidentally ; but I am glad at 

 the same time that I did not deserve it, having sent you a long letter in return to that 

 you was pleased to honour me with, and it is a pity it should be lost; for, as I remember, 

 it was full of the diei fabulas, and such particularities as usually do not find place in news- 

 papers." These quotations indicate the great intimacy between Hunter and those distin- 

 guished men. 



The same volume contains two letters from Hunter to Swift, dated New- York, 1st and 

 14th of March, 1712-13, both breathing great discontent and uneasiness with his situa- 

 tion. In the last he says, " Here is the finest air to live upon in the universe, and, if our 

 trees and birds could speak and our assemblymen be silent, the finest conversation too. 

 Fert omnia tellus; but not for me ; for you must understand, according to the custom of 

 our country, the sachems are of the poorest of the people. I have got the wrong side of 

 Sir Polidore's office ; a great deal to do, and nothing to receive. In a word, and to be 

 serious at last, I have spent three years of life in such torment and vexation that nothing 

 in life can ever make amende for it." 



Hunter was afterwards appointed Governor and Captain General of Jamaica, in the 

 room of the Duke of Portland, who died there in 1726. 



NOTE C. 



The first institution in the United States established as a repository of the native 

 vegetable productions of this country, and for the purpose of naturalizing such foreign 

 plants as are distinguished by their utility either in medicine, agriculture, or the arts, 

 was the Elgin Botanic Garden, founded in 1801, by Dr. David Hosack, at that time 

 Professor of Botany and Materia Medica in Columbia College. This establishment is 

 situated about three miles from the city of New- York, on the middle road between 

 Bloomingdale and Kingsbridge. The ground, consisting of about twenty acres, was 

 originally purchased of the corporation of this city. The view from the most elevated 

 part is variegated and extensive, and the soil itself of that diversified nature as to be 

 particularly adapted to the cultivation of a great variety of vegetable productions. 



13 



