Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/917

Rh of Nature and in criticising the illustrations prepared by others for his books. He is said to have maintained that "no man could become a nice, discriminating, and eminent botanist without possessing that acumen in perception of proportion, color, harmony of design, and obscure differences in the objects of the vegetable world which alone belong to the eye of a painter." He insisted on strict accuracy in details that even most careful naturalists would disregard. To mention an extreme instance of his exactness, he had every protuberance on the back, tail, and legs of a horned lizard counted, and required the precise number found to be represented in the drawing made for him.

In the spring of 1780 Benjamin, with one of his brothers, was placed in an academy at York, Pa., where he remained nearly two years, pursuing a course of classical study. When he was sixteen years of age his elder brother, who was living in Philadelphia, took him into his family, where he remained about four years. During this period he attended for a time the College of Philadelphia, and afterward, at the beginning of his eighteenth year, took up the study of medicine under Dr. William Shippen.

In the summer of 1785 he accompanied the commission, of which his uncle, Mr. Rittenhouse, was a member, that was engaged in running the western boundary line of Pennsylvania. Young Barton was absent from Philadelphia five months, and it was on this expedition that he gained his first acquaintance with the Indians and began his researches into their medicines and pathology, their general customs and history, which received a share of his attention for the rest of his life.

In order to obtain a thorough medical training it was at that time necessary to go abroad. Accordingly, young Barton repaired to Edinburgh in the autumn of 1786, where he studied for two years, with the exception of a few months spent in London. Having become a member of the Royal Medical Society at Edinburgh, he won the Harveian prize of that association for a dissertation on the Hyoscyamus niger of Linnæus (black henbane). Barton's first book was issued while he was in London, in the early part of 1787. It was a little pamphlet, entitled Observations on some Parts of Natural History: to which is prefixed an Account of some Considerable Vestiges of an Ancient Date, which have been discovered in Different Parts of North America. Considering his youth he was only twenty-one years of age—and the fact that he was afflicted with ill health when he wrote it, this production is very creditable; but it contained some ill-founded theories and other crudities that he readily and candidly acknowledged only a few months later. For a number of reasons—among them the failure of two professors to show him