fork Sarctr Eliot 21 
button-wood tree which meafured nine yards in girth, and 
made twenty-two cords of wood; and of an afh, which, at 
a yard from the ground, was fourteen feet eight inches 
in girth. He alio expreffes an intention to treat feparately 
the evergreens of New England; and this treatife, which 
was poffibly more valuable than the one juft noticed, was 
in the poffeffion of Peter Collinfon, the eminent patron of 
horticulture, and was given by him to J. F. Gronovius; 
but has not, that I am aware of, appeared in print. 1 
It is likely that the early phyficians of New England 
gave fpecial attention to thofe fimples of the country, the 
virtues of which were known to the favages; and perhaps 
it was partly in this way that the Rev. Jared Eliot (born 
1685), minifter of Killingworth in Connecticut, — who is 
called by Dr. Allen "the firft phyfician of his day," — is 
alfo defignated, both by him and by Eliot, a botanift; and 
by the latter, " the firft in New England." There is no 
doubt he was a friend of Dr. Franklin's, and a fcientific 
agriculturifl according to the knowledge of his day; and 
he is faid to have introduced the white mulberry into 
Connecticut. 2 His Agricultural Effays went through more 
than one edition, but is now rare. Mr. Eliot died while 
our next character, the firft native New-England botanift 
who deferves the name, was a ftudent of Yale College. 
1 Gronov. Fl. Virg., edit. 2. In Mr. Dillwyn's (unpublished) "Account of 
the Plants cultivated by the late Peter Collinson," from his own catalogue and 
other manuscripts, I find Collinson quoting Mr. Dudley's paper on Plants of New 
England, above mentioned ; but not that on the Evergreens. — Hortus Collins., 
p. 41. 
2 Eliot, Biog. Didl., and Allen, Amer. Biog. Di6t., in locis. 
