Quaker Botanists

QUAKER BOTANISTS By Francis W. Penneil Continued from Vol. 37 (1948): pp. 3-13 Next we must mention several contributors to the teaching of botany. Priscilla (Bell) Wakefield (1751-1832), who was honored by having her portrait painted by Gainsborough, published in London in 17% An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Familiar Letters, a work with a second edition of 1798 and a French translation in 1801. Dr. William Woodville (1752-1805) published in London from 1790 to 1794 a Medical Botany that was so popular as to be issued in two later editions, in 1810 and 1832, both subsequent to the author's death. To his memory the Swiss botanist, DeCandolle, in 1836 dedicated the genus Woodvillea , but this has been long included within the great Composite genus, Erigeron. Dr. John Dalton (1766-1844), the distinguished English chemist , as a young man seems to have taken an active interest in botanical collecting, since Britten and Boulger's Biographical Index of Deceased British and Irish Botanists, informs us that his herbarium in eleven volumes, comprising plants gathered near Kendal from 1790 to 1793, is preserved at the Manchester Public Library. Here in Pennsylvania Dr. Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), physician and professor of anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania , was a prominent figure in the intellectual and social life of Philadelphia in the opening nineteenth century. I hardly know his claim to be considered a botanist, but he is included both in John W. Harshberger's Botanists of Philadelphia and their Work, (1899), and, more surprisingly, in Britten and Boulger's Biographical Index. "In memory of Caspar Wistar, M. D.", Thomas Nuttall named a genus of shrubby vines of the pea family Wisteria , this unexpected spelling being repeated in the index of his book and carefully written by him on a label in the herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences. Wistar's writings, nearly wholly medical in character, are listed in Joseph Smith's Catalogue. I know not how closely Zaccheus Collins (1764-1831) was connected with our Society, but Doctor Barnhart says that "he 63 64 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION was well known as a Quaker philanthropist."17 He was an early Secretary of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and his correspondence is preserved at that institution. As a botanist Collins was critically minded and widely informed, and, although he published nothing, was held in high respect by his contemporaries. Thomas Nuttall, the printer from England who became the outstanding botanist of the Academy's early history, gave Collins' name to the remarkable American genus, Collinsia, that includes the "Blue-eyed Mary" of the Mississippi Valley and the "Chinese Houses" of California. Though his judgment was widely solicited, Collins was extremely chary of giving opinions, and his contemporaries despaired of ever receiving further news of any specimens sent him. Thus, Dr. John Torrey, the New York botanist who rapidly became the foremost authority on our flora, wrote to the Reverend Lewis David von Schweinitz in 1821 : "I sincerely deplore that [Nuttall's] crytog[amous] specimens have been swallowed by that retentive gulph, Mr. Collins, going into whose cave so many footsteps may be traced & none coming forth ! I have among the rest written to Collins more than once, but have never been blessed with an answer." How Collins became involved with the enthusiastic, but eccentric and designing Constantine S. Rafinesque, who was as ultra-rash as Collins was ultra-cautious, and how this foreigner, whom he had befriended, after Collins' death acquired most dubiously his friend's vast herbarium — of all this I have told in my account of Rafinesque presented as a centennial address in his memory at Transylvania College, Lexington, Kentucky, in 1940.18 It is a strange story. Reminiscent of the older botanists in at least one of his works, but mainly a pioneer in a specialized branch of botanical knowledge , was Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778-1855), an English Friend who "married out" of our Society. His Synopsis of British Confervœ, a group of seaweeds or Algae, appeared in 1802, and his ampler work, British Conferve, with colored figures and full descriptions, in 1809. Also, conjointly with Dawson Turner, another student of...