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with many hollow dangling flowers of a bright yellow Colour, speckled with a deeper yellow as it were shadowed, the Stalks are as hollow as a kix, and so are the roots, which are transparent, very tender, and full of a yellowish juice. The Indians make use of it for Aches, being bruised between two stones, and laid to cold, but made, (after the English manner) into an unguent with Hogs Grease, there is not a more sovereign remedy for bruises of what kind soever; and for Aches upon Stroakes."

The description is surprisingly good, and the figure unmistakable. A hundred years later the same plant was thought an excellent remedy for jaundice. To-day it has no place in the materia medica.

Of America's best-known gift to the world Josselyn says:

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The vertues of Tobacco are these, it helps digestion, the Gout, the Tooth-ach, prevents infection by scents, it heats the cold, and cools them that sweat, spent spirits restoreth, purgeth the stomach, killeth nits and lice; the juice of the green leaf healeth green wounds, although poysoned; the Syrup for many diseases, the smoak for the Phthisick, cough of the lungs, distillations of Rheume and all diseases of a cold and moist cause, good for all bodies cold and moist taken upon an emptie stomach, taken upon a full stomach it precipitates digestion, immoderately taken it dryeth the body, enflameth the bloud, hurteth the brain, weakens the eyes and the sinews."

A suggestion of the current mythology comes in the query appended to the account of plants introduced from England:

"2. What became of the influence of those Planets that produce and govern these Plants before this time?"

And the strictly human standpoint from which all diseases were regarded could hardly be better shown than by the following:

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our author had hardly learned its efficacy for fruit-trees by personal experi

ence.

Before the first native botanist is encountered, more than a century must be passed over. But this period was a great one in the history of science. The latter part of the seventeenth century saw the founding of the Royal Society of London and of other learned societies devoted to the "increase of natural knowledge," awakening to the external world which were the fruits of the great brought about by the Baconian philosophy. In spite of the fact that natural science speedily became the vogue in England, and a chief subject of polite conversation, some of its greatest discoveries date from this time. Such are those of the law of gravitation and of the circulation of the blood. Plants now began to be philosophically studied, and the broader outlines of a classification based on really fundamental features were now sketched. Besides, improvements in the theory and construction of the microscope made possible its application to the study of the minute structure of plants, and many important discoveries concerning their physiology were made in these and the following years. But the overwhelming influence of the great Linnæus obscured these profounder studies, and gave to the botany of the eighteenth century an almost exclusively systematic and descriptive

character. Linnæus was the author of the binomial system of nomenclature of plants and animals, which still goes back to his work as its basis, and of the artificial "sexual system" of classification, based on the stamens and pistils of the flowering plants, whose functions as reproductive organs were already recognized. The order which he brought out of the chaos of descriptive natural history was a blessing so unalloyed, and his system was so simple and seductive, that it was many years before most botanists again began to realize that their science properly comprehends

other problems than those involved in naming and pigeon-holing plants.

It was while the Linnæan enthusiasm was at its height that the first New England botanist appeared on the scene. Very many American plants had already been described by Linnæus and his followers; but they had been collected chiefly by travellers or settlers from Europe, and few of these had visited our rocky corner of the country. Manasseh Cutler was a native of Killingly, Conn., and was graduated at Yale in 1765. After a few years of teaching in Dedham, Mass., and of business life at Edgartown, in the intervals of which he read law, he was admitted to the bar. But he soon decided to enter the ministry, and studied with his father-in-law, Rev. Mr. Balch, of Dedham. He received. calls from several Massachusetts parishes, and finally, in 1771, accepted that to Ipswich Hamlet, which became, in 1793, the town of Hamilton. He there remained until his death, in 1823, the peer of any amongst the greathearted and large-minded ministers of those "times that tried men's souls," in whom New England orthodoxy so far outran in practice the meagre promise of its theory. His energy and capacity enabled him to study and successfully practise medicine during the Revolution, when the parish physician was at the front, and to eke out his slender salary by fitting for college many boys, in the list of whom one finds not a few of Salem's distinguished names,-Lowell, Silsbee, Derby and Cabot among the rest,—and by teaching the theory of navigation to others who became the most famous ship-masters of that old port's palmy days. After the Revolution, o'erleaping the narrow confines of New England, he personally engineered through Congress the famous grant of land in the Northwest Territory on which the first settlements were made, and secured the incorporation of the momentous clause in the "Ordinance of 1787" excluding slavery from the territory. He gave two sons to the first settle

ment at Marietta, and soon after spent a few months there, making the first serious study of the age of the wonderful earth-works of the Ohio valley, from data furnished by the trees and remains of trees found on them. He served his district in Congress during Jefferson's first term.

It was while doing double duty as spiritual and physical healer that Dr. Cutler first became attracted to the study of the plants of his neighborhood. He had also been much interested in some problems of plant physiology by reading the still classic "Vegetable Staticks" of Stephen Hales; but the difficulties under which he labored may be gathered from the fact that not even a barometer could be had in Salem. The dearth of books and of money for their purchase in a country parish, and the practical isolation occasioned by a separation of twenty-five miles in the days of horsepower locomotion, were also hindrances of a very practical kind to the pursuit of science.

In 1781 Dr. Cutler wrote to the Corporation of Harvard College that he had been trying to study plants, but had not the necessary books and had failed to procure them in Europe. He therefore asked to be allowed to borrow "Dr. Hill's Natural History" from the College library for a short time, offering to pay for its use such sum as the Corporation might determine. In spite of his modesty, one may be quite sure he received the desired permission unconditionally. In the same year, when the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was organized, Dr. Cutler was elected a member, and, two years later, a member of its first committee on communications. In 1785, in the first volume of the Memoirs of the Academy, was printed the chief published result of this writer's botanical studies, and the first account, after Josselyn's, of New England plants. This paper is entitled, "An Account of some of the Vegetable Productions growing naturally in this part of America, botanically arranged." It shows

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the beginning of the scientific spirit in botany, but also shows how large a place was still given by students of plants to the investigation of their properties. But the discrimination now evident is in marked contrast with the wholesale credulity of the previous century.

In his introduction Cutler wrote:

"The almost total neglect of botanical enquiries, in this part of the country, may be imputed, in part, to this, that Botany has never been taught in any of our Colleges, and to the difficulties that are supposed to attend it; but principally to the mistaken opinion of its inutility in common life."

A few extracts may illustrate his treatment of common plants:

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"The Indians considered this tree as a valuable article in their materia medica. They applied the bark, which is sedative and disentient, to painful tumors and external inflammations. A cataplasm of the inner rind of the bark is found to be efficacious in removing painful inflammations of the eyes. ... The specific qualities of this tree seem, by no means, to be accurately ascertained. It is, probably, possessed of very valuable properties."

Whatever may be its real value, witch-hazel has not yet lost its popular reputation for the very virtues here ascribed to it.

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ASCLEPIAS. - Silkweed. . .

"It may be carded and spun into an even thread, which makes an excellent wick-yarn. The candles will burn equally free, and afford a clearer light than those made of cotton wicks. They will not require so frequent snuffing, and the smoke of the snuff is less offensive."

Here is perhaps a practical suggestion for these days of the revival of candlelight.

“BERBERIS.— Barberry. . .

"It is said that rye and wheat will be injured by this shrub, at a distance of three or four hundred yards; but only when it is in blossom, by means of the farina fecundans being blown upon the grain, which prevents the ears from filling."

This is an interesting statement of the explanation offered a hundred years ago of the harmful influence of barberry bushes upon grain, the belief

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and the manuscript materials he left show that this would have placed him in the front of American botanists. More than a dozen volumes of notes and drawings were accumulated by him, and some of them are still in existence. According to the late Professor Tuckerman, he anticipated much of the work of later botanists, such as the separation of the hickories from the true walnuts, and the indication of many of the new species first published by Bigelow, Nuttall and Gray.

He conducted a voluminous correspondence with the most distinguished men of America and with many in Europe. The complete set of the "Species Plantarum" of Linnæus, sent him by the Swedish botanist Swartz, is now in the library of the Essex Institute, at Salem. He was elected a member of many learned societies, and received the title LL. D. from his alma mater in 1789. He was a lover of plants from an aesthetic, as well as from a scientific, standpoint, and cultivated about his house many not before seen in New England, such as the pawpaw, the persimmon, the tuliptree and the trumpet-vine. In the variety of his interests and occupations, and in his fine grasp of whatever he undertook, our pioneer botanist is but another example of the efficacy of hard work; and his life of eighty-one years is additional evidence that, with reasonable care, the human mechanism wears out no sooner than it rusts out.

An attempt to supply the lack of botanical teaching in our colleges, which Cutler remarked, was soon thereafter made. The first instruction in natural history in New England was given in lectures by Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, "Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic in the University at Cambridge, Mass." A native of Newport, R. I., and trained in the best European schools, Dr. Waterhouse steadily maintained that his interest in natural history was wholly subsidiary to his devotion to

medicine; but his conception of the scope of botany was so broad and modern, and his lectures were so superior, with due allowance for the state of knowledge in his time, to much that passes for botanical teaching to-day, that his standpoint deserves recognition here. He held for a few years the chair of Natural History in Brown University, and gave a course of twelve lectures on that general subject in 1786-87. In 1788 he began annual courses of lectures at Harvard, which attracted much attention. The botanical lectures of these courses were printed in the "Monthly Anthology" from 1804 to 1808; and in 1811 they were published at Boston in a volume entitled "The Botanist." In the preface to this volume, the author says:

"It is of importance that one universal language should be adopted by botanists; but it is wrong to make that and classification the primary object. Agreeably to this doctrine is the sentiment of the famous Rousseau, who, in his Letters on the Elements of Botany, says, I have always thought it possible to be a very great botanist without knowing so much as one plant by name.' . . . To be able to pronounce, at first sight, the name of each mineral, to distinguish one genus of plant from another, and to discriminate stuffed animals in a museum were, it seems, enough to entitle a man to be considered a Natural Historian; when, at the same time, he perhaps knew nothing of the anatomy of a seed, and of its gradual development into a perfect plant and flower, producing again a seed or epitome of its parent, capable of generating its kind forever."

These words are equally appropriate at present, for the idea of botany which they embody is hardly better grasped by the popular mind than when they were written.

A result of Dr. Waterhouse's lectures was that "several gentlemen of opulence and literary influence in the government of the University came to the resolution of laying a foundation for a Professorship of Botany and Entomology; to which they determined to annex an extensive Botanic Garden." Thirty or forty thousand. dollars were subscribed, and the Legislature gave two townships toward the

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