Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/763

Rh and before the introduction of railroads afforded the best accommodations and facilities to the traveling public. He was one of the original stockholders and directors of the Clinton Bank, and for a time its president.

Mr. Sullivant was not one of those whose predilection for science appeared at an early age. He was nearly thirty years old, and his youngest brother, Joseph, was already somewhat proficient in botany, conchology, and ornithology, before his interest in natural history was aroused. He had married Miss Jane, daughter of Alexander K. Marshall, of Kentucky, and niece of Chief-Justice Marshall, and was living in his suburban residence in a rich floral district. His wife had died within a year after marriage, leaving him an infant daughter.

His first scientific observations were upon the birds. When his attention was directed to botany, by his brother Joseph, he took up the subject with the determination to acquire a thorough knowledge of it. "He collected and carefully studied," says Prof. Gray in the memoir already quoted from, "the plants of the central part of Ohio, made neat sketches of the minuter parts of many of them, especially of the grasses and sedges, entered into communication with the leading botanists of the country, and in 1840 he published A Catalogue of Plants, Native or Naturalized, in the Vicinity of Columbus, Ohio (63 pages), to which he added a few pages of valuable notes. His only other direct publication in phanerogamous botany is a short article upon three new plants which he had discovered in that district, contributed to the American Journal of Science and Arts in the year 1842. The observations which he continued to make were communicated to his correspondents and friends, the authors of the Flora of North America, then in progress.

"As soon as the flowering plants of his district had ceased to afford him novelty, he turned to the mosses, in which he found abundant scientific occupation, of a kind well suited to his bent for patient and close observation, scrupulous accuracy, and nice discrimination. His first publication in his chosen department, the Musci Alleghanienses, was accompanied by the specimens themselves of mosses and hepaticæ collected in a botanical expedition through the Alleghany Mountains from Maryland to Georgia, in the summer of 1843, the writer of this notice being his companion. The specimens were not only critically determined, but exquisitely prepared and mounted, and with letterpress of great perfection; the whole forming two quarto volumes, which well deserve the encomium bestowed by Pritzel in his Thesaurus. It was not put on sale, but fifty copies were distributed