Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/358

 352 TEE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

had occasion to take aa extended tarn through the Northern States. This opened to their eyes a new flora as seen in the first week of Jirne. Jefferson writes enthusiastically to his son-in-law^ and fellow lover of plants, Thomas Mann Bandolph :

BsKKiNOTON IN Vebmont, June 5, 1791. Dear Sir: Mr. Madison and myself are so far on the tour we had projected.

After describing the battlefield of Saratoga he continues :

We have also visited Forts William, Henry and George, Ticonderoga, Grown Point, etc., which have been scenes of blood from a very early part of history — ^We were more pleased, however, with the botanical objects which con- tinually presented themselves. Those either unknown or rare in Virginia, were the sugar maple in vast abundance, the silver flr, white pine, pitch pine, spruce pine, a shrub with decumbent stems, which they caU juniper, an azalea very different from the nudiflora, with very large clusters of flowers, more thickly set on the branches, of a deeper red and high pink-fragrance. It is the richeat shrub I have seen. The honeysuckle of the gardens growing wild on the banks of Lake George, the paper birch, an aspen with a velvet leaf, a shrub-willow with downy catkins, a wild gooseberry, a wild cherry with single fruit (not tke bunch cherry), strawberries in abundance.

The azalea here referred to with such enthusiasm^ was in the opin- ion of Mr. W. W. Eggleston, probably A. canescens, first normally de- scribed twelve years later in 1803 by Michaux the elder. Had Jeffer- son taken the trouble to give his observations the form of conventional descriptions^ it is quite likely that his discoveries would have added several plants then new to science.

During the next decade, that preceding his first presidency, Jeffer- son found his time very largely occupied with the duties involved in the positions of Secretary of State, under Washington, and Vice-president with John Adams, but incidentally he serves as President of the Amer- ican Philosophical Society, he writes an essay on the study of Anglo- Saxon, he drafts the famous Kentucky resolutions, makes preliminaiy plans for an educational institution which in the later years of his life became the University of Virginia, and prepares a parliamentary manual, still in very general use in legislative assembles. During this period he was the recognized leader of the newly formed Bepublican party and as such was involved in what was perhaps the most bitter partisan contest ever waged in our political history.

During this period there are many incidental proofs of his con- tinued pleasure in botany as when on April 1, 1892, at Mrs. Trisfs desire he sends to Benjamin Hawkins

about a dozen beans of three different kinds, having first taken toU of them if she has done before. They are of the scarlet flowering kind. This is all I know of them. The most beautiful bean in the world is the Garacalla bean, which though in England a greenhouse plant, wiU grow in the open air in Yix- ginia and Carolina. I could never get one of these in my life. Thej ais worthy your enquiry.

On June 2, 1793, writing from Philadelphia, he does a good tarn for his friend John by writing to James Madison:

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