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Rh recognition of his work are patent in all his writings and transactions. When Dr. Barton announced, in 1791, his illustrated Flora of Pennsylvania as in preparation, Muhlenberg concluded that as that author had seen his manuscripts and herbarium, it would not be necessary for him to publish anything except a few additional notes which he might make during the year, and a Floral Calendar. "Excuse my enthusiasm for science," he wrote to Dr. Cutler, in 1792, "which has given me so many pleasant hours, and which, I know, has been cultivated by you with great success. Botany needs your co-operation, and when you have prepared a full table, please leave a few fragments for me." It was this readiness to give credit to the merit of others, combined with his clear vision of the confusion that threatened to arise from the continuance of planless labors, that decided him as early as 1785 to bring out a plan for common labor in making up the Flora of North America. He came to the Philosophical Society again in 1790 or 1791 with this plan. "I repeat," he writes, "my formerly expressed desire that a number of my learned countrymen should unite in botanical investigation and send in their floras to the society for revision and publication, so that by combination of the floras of the different States we may obtain a flora of the United States which shall rest on good and definite observations." While this plan was not carried into execution through the medium of the American Philosophical Society, Muhlenberg again and again returned to it in his extensive correspondence. Thus he wrote: "Others should do the same (that is, search out the flora of the neighborhood of their homes), and, after collecting material for a dozen years, let a Flora of North America be written." Further, "I first sent in a sketch, and in 1790 an index of all the plants that grow here, in the expectation that my botanical friends would join in working up the floras of their several States, so that in about ten years a more general work might be undertaken." And in another place: "If the botanists continue to proceed in the way they are going, in a few years all will be confusion. In order to be sure, we should confer with one another. For this purpose I have printed my Index before publishing full descriptions." A letter to Dr. Cutler, of November 12, 1792, goes more into particulars; it reads: "You have made the beginning of a Flora of New England, and all friends of botany wish that you would go on and complete the work. Let each of our American botanists do something, and the wealth of America would soon be recognized. Michaux should do South Carolina and Georgia; Kromsch, North Carolina; Greenway, Virginia and Maryland; Barton, New Jersey, Delaware, and the lower parts of Pennsylvania; Bartram, Marshall, and Muhlenberg, each his neighborhood; Mitchell, New York; and you, with the Northern botanists, your States. How