306 
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 
ward of commendation. An account, therefore, of the earlier 
cultivators of our indigenous Materia Medica may be justly 
expected from a teacher of that science, addressing those who 
are to be at once the depositaries of the reputation of their 
predecessors, and claimants of a like office from posterity to- 
wards themselves. I wish to make the proposed sketch as 
full as the occasion will permit; but it will be necessarily 
inadequate, and should be filled up by your own further re- 
search. 
The earliest notices which I have been able to discover of 
North America medicinal plants are those contained in the 
Flora Virginica of Dr. John Clayton, published at Leyden by 
Gronovius in 1739. Dr. Clayton was a native of England, 
but emigrated early in life to Virginia, where he became emi- 
nent as a naturalist and physician, and died in 1773 at the 
very advanced age of 88 years. Dr. Thatcher states that he 
published, in the Philosophical Transactions, an ample account 
of the medicinal plants which he had discovered. It is his 
name, I presume, that has been enshrined in the botanical de- 
signation of that beautiful little spring flower — the Clay Ionia 
Virginica. , 
In the years 1743 and 1744 similar medico-botanical notices 
of plants growing in the province of New York were published 
in the Upsal Transactions by Dr. Cadwallader Colden, a gen- 
tleman of considerable scientific and political distinction, who 
came from Great Britain to this country about the year 1710, 
and established himself in that province. 
But, perhaps, the most ample of these earlier contributions 
was that by John Bartram, a native, I believe, of Pennsyl- 
vania, who was distinguished as an indefatigable cultivator of 
botany, and is very favorably remembered in this city as the 
founder of the Botanical Garden upon the Schuylkill, which 
has always gone by his name, and is still in the hands of one 
of his descendants. His essay, containing a description of 
several medicinal plants of North America, was printed in the 
year 1756, in the Amcenitates Academics of Linnaeus, as a 
portion of a paper denominated Specijica Canadensium,^XQ- 
