Portions of the Journal of André Michaux, Botanist, written during his Travels in the United States and Canada, 1785 to 1796. With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes, by C. S. Sargent. (Read before the American Philosophical Society, October 19, 1888 ) PREFACE. The younger Michaux, in the year 1824, presented to the American Philosophical Society the manuscript diary kept by his father during his travels in America. The first parts had been unfortunately lost in the wreck of the vessel in which Michaux returned to France from America, and no record is preserved of his travels in this country from the time of his arrival in New York in September, 1785, until his first visit to South Carolina in 1787. Reference is made to this Journal by Deleuze in his biographical memoir of Michaux, printed in the fourth volume of the Annales du Muséum in 1804, and, doubtless, he had access to its pages, as without them he could scarcely have followed the footsteps of the French botanist through the wilds of the American continent. The first notice of the Journal which appeared in this country is found in a paper by Prof. Asa Gray, entitled Notes of a Botanical Excursion to the Mountains of North Carolina, published in the American Journal of Science, in 1841, in which some account of Michaux's American travels and discoveries, with short extracts from his Journal, appear. A more detailed account of those parts of this document which relate to Canada, with notes upon Michaux's Canadian plants, was published in 1863 by the Abbé Ovide Brunet under the title of Notice sur les Plantes de Michaux et sur son Voyage au Canada et à la Baie Hudson. These brief extracts directed the attention of botanists to this record of the travels of one of the most interesting and picturesque figures in the annals of botanical discovery in America; and for many years the feeling has existed among them that the Journal which furnishes an important chap. ter in the history of the development of American botany should be published. The American Philosophical Society having shared in these views, PROC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXVI. 129. A. PRINTED FEB. 11, 1889. |