Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/248

244 Dr. F. Adolph Wislizenus came to America from Germany in 1835; he landed at New York and lived there for the next two years. In 1837 he went west, settling near Belleville, 111. Two years later he came to St. Louis and lived in that city practically all the rest of his life. He is not known to have performed any botanical work in the vicinity of St. Louis, but he is included in the present paper because of having made a very considerable collection of plants in New Mexico, Mexico, and other parts of the great American arid plain. This collection was

 by permission of the St. Louis Academy of Sciences, from a photograph in their possession.

one of the first from the region visited, and is considered especially important because Dr. Wislizenus was one of the first to give an accurate, scientific account of the sections visited by him. This is especially true of Mexico, of which there were very erroneous and distorted ideas in the United States.

Dr. Frederick Adolphus Wislizenus was born in 1810 at Koenigsee, in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, one of the numerous tiny German principalities of that period. He was the youngest of three children of a Protestant minister whose ancestors were said to have fled from Bohemia, victims of the religious fanaticism which resulted in the persecution of Hus and his followers.