Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/355

 THOMAS JEFFERSON IN RELATION TO BOTANY 349

there was a copy of Catesby. His botanical library became in time one of the best in America, a fact attested by the frequent loan of rare Yolmnes to students of plants not so fortunate as to own copies them- selves.

Semarkable as was the breadth and intensity of Jefferson^s interests in affairs, he was not the author of many books. The service demanded of him by state and country with little intermission from his election to the House of Burgesses of the Colony of Virginia in 1769 to his retirement from the Presidency forty years later, gave him at no time the continuous leisure required for doing any large body of original in- vestigation. We find, therefore, outside of the myriad references more or less extended to matters of science (and botany in particular) pre- served in his very voluminous correspondence, but one extended work, a book appearing first under date of 1782, entitled *' Notes on Virginia.^' And that book became one through no deliberate intention on the part of Jefferson to be an author on this subject. His friend, the French representative to America, M. de Marbois, wishing information for friends in Europe, begged Jeflferson to set down answers to a series of questions dealing with the main points of interest and importance con- cerning his native state. In response to this request, Jefferson wrote down rapidly and without great research the series of chapters which eventually became the book mentioned. These chapters dealt more completely and scientifically with Virginia than any previous work had done with any of the sister states and has been referred to by Greneral Greely as the first great American contribution to scientific geography. The book ran through many editions in English, and through several in a very inaccurate French version published without Jefferson's knowl- edge or consent. A German edition also appeared.

Probably this book represents the first important contribution made by Jefferson to biological science and serves as a landmark in his career. The chapter dealing with the flora of the state gives lists of medicinal, esculent, ornamental and otherwise useful native plants. The com- mon names as well as the Linnsean names were used. Not finding the pecan described in Miller, Linnaeus or Clayton, he says, "Were I to venture to describe this, speaking of the fruit from memory, and of the leaf from plants of two years* growth, I should specify Juglans alba, foliolis lanceolatis, acuminatis, serratis, tomentosis, fructa minore, ovato, compresso, vix insculpto, dulci, putamine tenerrime,** (which trans- lated says this : Juglans alba, with leaflets lanceolate, acuminate, serrate, tomentose, fruit small, ovate, compressed, little sculptured, sweet, shell thin.) ''It grows on the Illinois, Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi." This description was written in 1781 or early in 1782 and appeared in print in Paris in 1784, one year before Humphrey Marshall described the pecan in his ''Arbustum Americanum," the work in which the

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