18 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
had been done before this time in America, for as 
early as 1648 a course of one hour a week in Botany was 
established at Harvard. This was more than a century 
before the first American professor of Botany, Adam Kalm, 
was, about 1768, installed at the University of Pennsyl- 
vania. The first serious collecting of plants in our country 
seems to have been done by Thomas Walker in South Car- 
olina, in 1740, and following him Kalm collected and sent 
to his teacher, Linneus. Michaux, in 1780, began his 
famous trip through the South and West to the Mississippi 
river, culminating in his flora of North America with 
1700 plants, and Pursh, Nuttall, Houston and Clayton fol- 
lowed shortly and aided in the early work. Of these men, 
Michaux and Walter at least collected some lichens. 
However, American lichenology can be traced back 
nearly a half century before any of this collecting was 
done, to a time when our botanical science in general was 
in a rudimentary condition. Possibly some of the semi- 
civilized peoples of North America may have known some 
lichens as long ago as the days when Theophrastus and 
later the elder Pliny seem to have known something of 
them, and when the Greeks supposed plants to possess 
mind and soul and to be capable of pleasure and pain . 
Again, some of the early settlers in America may have 
done some obscure work on lichens and may have carried 
some specimens to Europe where they w T ere perhaps 
studied, but the first definite record that I am able to find 
is that Carolus Plumier, in his work published in 1703 at 
Paris, records Sticta damaecornis. Thus so far as tangible 
evidence is concerned, North American lichenology ap- 
pears to be just about two centuries old. This work of 
Plumier’s appeared a half century before Linnaeus had 
devised the binomial system of plant names, and the plant 
was designated, Lichen rufescens , cornua , damae referns, 
from resemblance of the thallus lobes to buck horns. It 
is not so strange that this plant, no doubt picked up by 
chance, happened to be new to science when we recall that 
the whole number of lichens known at this time was less 
than 100. Petiver, in a work published in London, 1712, 
