Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/61

Rh Nuttall remained for two months collecting plants and sea shells upon the different islands. He then separated from his companion and sailed for California. He spent most of the spring and summer upon the Pacific coast and then returned to the Sandwich Islands, where he embarked upon the same vessel that Dana was serving his "Two Years Before the Mast," to come home by way of Cape Horn. He arrived at Philadelphia in October, 1835, and settled down to study his treasures. For several years he worked thus and published two important memoirs. At Christmas, 1841, Nuttall went back to England, where he resided the last seventeen years of his life. This was not from choice, but because of the conditions under which an estate was left to him by his uncle, requiring him to live in England nine months of the year. He used his ample grounds for growing rare plants. Just previously to leaving the United States he wrote a supplement to Michaux's "Sylva." In the preface his wanderings were outlined. He returned to America but once, when he took the last three months of 1847 and the first three months of 1848. At this time he studied the plants brought by Gamble from the Eocky Mountains and Upper California, and published a paper upon them. His death occurred on September 10, 1859, resulting from overstraining himself in opening a box of plants.

Torrey and Gray dedicated a genus of the Rosaceæ Nuttallia, to this prince of scientists.

Henry Shaw has honored him by placing a small obelisk of granite near the north end of the museum building in the Missouri Botanical Garden, with the following inscriptions: on the north side, "In Honour of American Science," and on the south side, "To the Memory of Thomas Nuttall, born in England 1786 and died September, 1859. Honour to him the zealous and successful naturalist, the father of western American botany, the worthy compeer of Barton, Michaux, Hooker, Torrey, Gray and Engelmann." He also placed over the entrance of the main greenhouse in the Garden three busts: that of Linnaeus in the middle, and those of Nuttall and Gray on either side.

Although Nuttall explored the Missouri country on two different occasions and worked in Arkansas, he seems never to have published any considerable list of plants found by himself near St. Louis.