i6 
Sossrlpn as a Botanist. 
England. " The plants in New England," he fays in his 
"Voyages," p. 59, "for the variety, number, beauty, and 
virtues, may Hand in competition with the plants of any 
countrey in Europe. Johnfon hath added to Gerard's 
f Herbal ' three hundred, and Parkinfon mentioneth many 
more. Had they been in New England, they might have 
found a thoufand, at leaft, never heard of nor feen by any 
Englifhman before." 1 Nor did our author fail to adorn 
his " Rarities " with recognizable figures, as well as de- 
fcriptions, of fome of thefe new American plants; and 
1 Mention of New-England plants may be found in earlier writers than Cor- 
nuti or Josselyn ; but what is said is now rarely available. Gosnold's expedition 
was in 1602 ; and the writer of the account of it tells us that the island upon 
which his party proposed to settle (Cuttyhunk, one of the Elizabeth Islands) was 
covered with " oaks, ashes, beech, walnut, witch-hazel, sassafrage, and cedars, 
with divers others of unknown names;" beside "wild pease, young sassafrage, 
cherry-trees, vines, eglantine, gooseberry-bushes, hawthorn, honeysuckles, with 
others of the like quality;" as also "strawberries, rasps, ground-nuts, alexander, 
surrin, tansy, &c, without count." — Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. xxviii. p. 76. And so 
the writer of Mourt's Relation, in 1620, speaks of " sorrel, yarrow, carvel, brook- 
lime, liverwort, watercresses, &c, as noticed, " in winter," however, at Plymouth. 
— Hist. Coll. vol. viii. p. 221. There is much here which is true enough, though 
the " eglantine " of the first writer is an evident mistake, as doubtless also the 
"carvel" of the other; but we have no reason to suppose that either of these 
passages ever had any scientific value. Josselyn, so far as his Botany goes, does 
not belong to this class of writers. There are important parts of his account of 
our plants, in which we know with certainty what he intended to tell us; and, 
farther, that this was worth the telling. And the credit which fairly belongs to 
the new genera of American plants, in some sort indicated by him, shall illustrate 
as well those other portions of his work where what he meant is a matter 
rather of deduction from his particulars, such as they are, in the light of his only 
here-and-there-cited authorities, than of plain fact. His English names — com- 
mon, and perhaps often indefinite, as they strike us — had more of scientific 
value, in botanical hands at least, when he wrote, than now; and, there is good 
reason to suppose, were meant to indicate that the plants intended, or in some 
cases the genera to which they belonged, were the same with those published, 
under the same names, by Gerard, Johnson, and Parkinson. 
