Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/855

Rh this time were Dr. Reichenbach, of Dresden; Kunze, of Leipsic; Major Le Conte, United States Army; Blumenbach, of Göttingen; Elliott, of South Carolina; Schwaegrichen, of Leipsic; and Hooker, of England. The first fruit of his botanical work in the South was a synopsis of the fungi of North Carolina, written in Latin, which was given to the world in 1818 through the Society of Naturalists at Leipsic, under the editorial care of Dr. D. F. Schwaegrichen. Among the one thousand three hundred and seventy-three species described in this synopsis, there are three hundred and fifteen that were new to science. In the same year his duties required him to attend a synod of his religious brethren at Herrnhut. On his way he visited England, France, and Holland, and established correspondences which were of great value to him after he returned to America and began the formation of a regular herbarium. In 1821 von Schweinitz published at Raleigh, N. C., a pamphlet containing descriptions of seventy-six species of Hepaticæ (liverworts), among them being nine discovered by him. In the same year he contributed to the American Journal of Science, then in its fifth volume, a Monograph on the Genus Viola, in which five new species were described. This was a valuable paper, and was often cited by European botanists. In it he made the interesting statement that among the thirty species of violets then known in America there was not one exactly like any of the twenty European species.

During his residence at Salem, von Schweinitz had been offered the presidency of the University of North Carolina. The acceptance of this honorable position would have necessitated giving up his service in the Moravian Church, and so, feeling that the Brethren had the best claim upon his energies, he declined it. At the beginning of the year 1832 he removed to Pennsylvania, and took up his residence in his native village of Bethlehem. Here he undertook the charge of the Moravian girls' seminary at that place, and the secular office of general agent for the Brethren was retained. His botanical studies were not suffered to languish. "The beautiful slopes and valleys about Bethlehem and Nazareth," says Johnson, "the romantic banks of the Delaware, and the precipitous rocks of the Lehigh, all yielded up to him a tribute of their hitherto unexplored treasures. The high estimation set upon his works by men of science had procured his election as an honorary member in several societies devoted to natural history, both in Europe and America. His correspondence increased, and the formation of his herbarium advanced with great rapidity." About this time Major Long's expedition to the sources of the St. Peter's River, in the Northwest Territory, returned. It had been arranged that the plants collected on this trip by Thomas