Page:A Biographical Sketch (of B. S. Barton) - William P. C. Barton.djvu/19

Rh alone in the capacity of private lecturer on anatomy in the winter of 1762–3, being the first winter after his return from his studies in Europe. His success as a private lecturer, demonstrated the expediency of engrafting a medical school on the College of Philadelphia, and in consequence, he was unanimously elected the professor of anatomy and surgery, on the 17th of September, 1765. This able teacher held that chair until his death, which occurred the 11th of July, 1808, in the seventy-fifth year of his age. I have been more particular in relation to Dr. Shippen, because he was, as I have just stated, the founder of the medical school; for until he delivered lectures in Philadelphia, the voice of a publick lecturer had never been heard here. Dr. Adam Kuhn, now living and in the practice of medicine in this city, who had been a pupil of Linnæus at Upsal, was appointed professor of botany, connected with the materia medica. The late eminent Dr. Rush was appointed to the chair of chymistry, and Dr. Thomas Bond, an ingenious and eminent physician, gave clinical lectures in the Pennsylvania Hospital. In the year 1789, the trustees of the College of Philadelphia instituted a professorship of natural history and botany, which was conferred on Dr. Barton, then only twenty-four years of age. Dr. Kuhn had previously to this delivered some courses of lectures on botany, but natural history had never before been taught. Dr. Barton then was the first lecturer on natural history in Philadelphia, and, so far as I know, the first teacher of natural science in the cis-atlantic world. This appointment was confirmed to him in the year 1791, on the incorporation of the college with the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Barton, at the period of his death, had held this professorship for the space of six-and-twenty years. I beg leave in relating the benefits to natural science that resulted from the labours of the late industrious Professor, to quote what I have published on this point in the preface of my Prodromus of a Flora Philadelphica. "During this period Professor Barton delivered twenty-five courses of lectures on botany, in which he inculcated a high sense of the real benefits of the pursuit, in a medical point of view, with an enthusiasm that gave unequivocal evidence of his attachment to the interests of the science and the honour of the university. Such was the