Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/515

Rh first and foremost a botanist from choice, he was a chemist by profession, and managed to work at his beloved plants in the hours not spent in an assaying office or in teaching chemistry to the students of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. His work on the American flora was perhaps the most critical that has ever been done, and when we consider the meager materials known in his period, we are profoundly impressed with his wonderful breadth of mind and the accuracy of his knowledge. So well was Torrey known in 1831 that Asa Gray, just through with his medical studies in central New York, sought out Torrey at New York and commenced his apprenticeship in botany under a master mind. What Gray afterwards became in American botany he owed in large measure to the start given him by John Torrey, a fact Gray himself was not slow to admit, and the friendship of the two men never ceased. Torrey provided Gray a curator's post in the old Lyceum of Natural History in order that he might have the means to carry on his studies; he gave him the encouragement of a father, as well as of an instructor; and he finally associated Gray with himself in the preparation of the first great Flora of North America, a fact that gave Gray at once a name and a standing among botanists abroad. The study on the flora early brought to light the necessity of examining the types of American plants preserved in the collections of Europe, and Torrey, unable to make many visits himself, made it possible for Gray to do this and thus come into personal contact with the older generation of botanical spirits of the old world. The call from Harvard came to Gray in 1843 and closed the combined work of Torrey and Gray on the ‘Flora of North America.’ Changes in our national history, to which I shall allude later, shifted for a time the studies on the American flora, and before the further publication of the work was possible, Torrey had passed to his last sleep. Gray built up at Cambridge the herbarium and garden that bear his name, and after Torrey's death continued his publication of the ‘Synoptical Flora,’ but the work was left unfinished when Gray died in 1888.

Contemporary with Torrey in his early days were two botanists we need to mention. One was Stephen Elliott, who published a sketch of the botany of Georgia in 1816-1824 and who may be fairly considered the father of southern botany. Elliott's successor was Dr. A. W. Chapman, who published three editions of the Flora of the Southern States before his death, and Chapman's successor has recently given us an enlarged Flora of the same region. The other contemporary of Dr. Torrey was French in ancestry, a Turk by birth, a Sicilian by adoption, and a vagabond by nature, gifted, versatile, wildly enthusiastic, erratic, much maligned and never understood either by his contemporaries or by his biographers. His name was Rafinesque, which