THOMAS JEFFERSON IN RELATION TO BOTANY
By RODNEY H. TRUE from The Scientific Monthly, Volume 3. 1916
We are all familiar with Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence and the first great American radical leader, but we are less familiar with the fact that amid the political tempests which raged around him he never ceased to live the life of an ardent lover of the world of living things. In the volumes of his correspondence there appear not only letters dealing with the momentous questions of national life, neutrality, peace or war, slavery or no slavery, government by the people or only government for the people, but also many to men of science dealing with the various questions that agitated their world a hundred years ago.
Systems of classification, identity of doubtful plants, problems of the cultivator in field and green-house, the introduction of new and useful kinds, and the best apportionment of time to be given to the several sciences found in the college curriculum are among the subjects of consideration both with American and with European correspondents. Jefferson was interested in all useful branches of science, and since his conception of utility was very broad, few lines of research that had developed in his day failed to receive some attention from this tireless man.
The name of our scientist-statesman, Benjamin Franklin, will occur to all minds in this connection. Undoubtedly Franklin's work on electricity was one of the greatest achievements yet credited to America. It is doubtful, however, whether he was in touch with so wide a range of scientific interests as was Jefferson...
His botanical setting included some of the chief landmarks set up in that science during the years of his long life. Born in 1743, Jefferson as a four-year-old boy might have known Dillenius at the time of his death. He was six years old when Mark Catesby, the author of the famous " History of Carolina, etc./' passed away. He was two years old when Gronovius published Clayton's " Flora of Virginia."
The chief botanical figures of the period covered by Jefferson's youth were Jussieu, the eldest ; Philip Miller, of the " Gardener's Dictionary"; Peter Collinson, the witty English Quaker botanist and correspondent of Linnaeus ; John Bartram, of Philadelphia, likewise a Quaker; Dr. Alexander Garden, of Charleston, and the great Linnaeus himself... Linnaeus was engrossing the attention of the world of science by inaugurating his peaceful revolution in classification and nomenclature.
As he entered young manhood, among the prominent figures of earlier days but now passing from the stage were some familiar to us: Cadwallader Colden, the botanizing governor of the New York colony died in the year of the Declaration of Independence, Bernard de Jussieu and John Bartram one year later, Linnaeus two years later, and his pupil, the Swedish botanical explorer, Peter Kalm, three years later..
Among those who were boys with Jefferson were Humphrey Marshall, one of that famous group of Philadelphia Quaker naturalists who left his mark on American botany in his little book entitled " Arbustum Americanum"; Adam Kuhn, the first professor of botany in the College of Philadelphia, and perhaps in the whole country ; Andre Michaux, the elder of that pair of French travelers and naturalists who added so largely to the botanical knowledge of America, and lastly, Laurent de Jussieu, through whose work chiefly the so-called Natural System of Classification found form and currency..
In Jefferson's first administration (1801-1805), Dr. Benjamin S. Barton, of Philadelphia, published his " Elements of Botany/' the first great American botanical text-book, and Dr. David Hosack established near New York his Elgin botanical garden, later attached to Columbia College.
In the years immediately following Jefferson's retirement from the presidency appeared Barton's " Flora Virginica" (in part), F. A. Michaux's " History of the Forest Trees of North America," Pursh's "Flora Americas Septentrionalis," and Muhlenberg's "Catalogue," which a few years later was brought on to the basis of the Natural System by the versatile diplomat, Abbe Correa, the Portuguese Minister to the United States.
This same period witnessed the remarkable advance in chemistry marked by the discovery of oxygen by Priestly, from whom Jefferson received many letters. The work of Ingenhauss, of Vienna, and that of DeSaussure and of Senebier at Geneva developed the basal facts concerning the gaseous interchanges taking place in respiration and photosynthesis in plants. Thomas A. Knight, the pioneer in physiology and plant breeding, and Sir Humphry Davy, the great chemist and physicist, lived their most active days concurrently with Jefferson... Jefferson's death took place in 1826, the year of the appearance of William Darlington's "Florula Cestrica."
