A Kind of Botanic Mania

A Kind of Botanic Mania joan W. Goodwin The simplicity of Linnaeus’ classification system opened the field of botany to amateurs and its study was soon seen as "peculiarly adapted to females." "I have this summer paid some attention to nist husbands and fathers. Linnaeus’s daughter Botany," wrote seventeen-year-old Sarah Alden Elizabeth Christina saw her report on phospho- Bradford (1793-1867) to fourteen-year-old rescence in nasturtiums published in the Trans- Abigail Bradford Allyn (1796-1860). "It is not a actions of the Royal Swedish Academy of very useful study, although a very pleasing one,"" Sciences in 1762.3 In this country, Jane Colden she continued. "It is however an innocent (1724-1766) was introduced to botany by her amusement, and enables us to discover Divine father, Cadwallader Colden, who wrote the first Wisdom, even in the construction of the small- local flora of New York based on the Linnaean est flower." Anticipating her family’s move system. Jane corresponded with experts in the later that year of 1810 from Boston to Duxbury, field on both sides of the Atlantic, was widely where her third cousin Abigail lived, Sarah praised for her botanical drawings, and was added her intention "to try to persuade you to commended to Linnaeus himself.4 join with me, in examining plants, and arrang- From the mid-eighteenth century on into the I ing them under their respective classes."’ nineteenth, the study of botany was considered Apparently she succeeded. Soon Sarah’s father especially appropriate for young women who, it was writing to her brother at Harvard that was assumed, liked flowers, were nurturing by "Sarah & Abba are studying Botany and one virtue of their gender, and would benefit from would think they hold converse only with the healthful but not strenuous outdoor exercise. As flowers for they in a manner seclude themselves Almira Phelps wrote in her Familiar Lectures from human observation & from communica- on Botany (1829), "the study of Botany seems tion with animal nature. I dont know what peculiarly adapted to females; the objects of its flower they affect to emulate but I dare say they investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pur- are known to each other under some order or suits, leading to exercise in the open air, are con- class of the Lin[na]ean system." If the Harvard ducive to health and cheerfulness."5 However, student should write to his sister, Bradford there was some concern that since the Linnaean advised him to "talk about calyx, corolla, & system was based on the sexual characteristics petals & I will engage you will be read."2 of plants, it might offend delicate sensibilities. Without realizing it, Sarah and Abba were In Britain, "desexualized" texts were created for part of a fashionable trend that was drawing female audiences, and in France Jean Jacques many young women into the study of botany. Rousseau omitted the Linnaean system in his The simplicity of the new binomial system 1771 Lettres elementaires sur la botanique, of classification devised by Swedish botanist written for a mother to use with her daughter. Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778)-which catego- Thomas Martyn’s English translation, Letters rized plants according to the number and posi- on the Elements of Botany, addressed to a lady, tion of the stamens and pistils of their flowers- on the other hand, suggested that the Linnaean opened the field of botany to amateurs, many of system be used for classification.6 whom made major contributions in describing Though much has been written about botany and classifying plants. Wives and daughters as "the female science," the letters of Sarah were introduced to the study as helpers of bota- Alden Bradford provide a rare record of the 188 natural history collections. It may well have been Judge Davis who first interested her in botany. Martyn’s version of Rousseau was available to Sarah in Judge Davis’s library, along with Linnaeus’s own Genera Plantarum (1754), Philosophla Botanica (1790), and Flora Lapponica (edited by J. E. Smith, 1792), and James Lee’s popular exposition of the Linnaean system, Introduction to Botany (Edinburgh, 1797).’ Back in Boston after a happy year in Duxbury, Sarah continued her literary and botanical correspondence with Abba. From Judge Davis she bor- rowed The Botanic Garden ( 1789-1791 /, m which Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin combined mythic and scientific elements in verse. The first part, "The Economy of Vegetation," depicts the god- dess Flora and numerous spirits as directing the vegetable king- dom. The second part, "The Loves of Plants," dealt with the Linnaean system in metaphors of courtship and marriage. Sarah described the first part to Abba as "very beautiful" This portrait of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley at fifty-three, drawn by Cheney though "highly figurative" and m 1846, now hangs m the Old Manse m Concord, Massachusetts. "splendid perhaps even to a observations of a particular young woman fault." She did not expect to like the second caught up in the general excitement during part so well because "[i]t is founded on the those years. Sarah read French as well as sexual system of Linnaeus, that the dust of the English, and Gamaliel Bradford, her broad- anthers is absorbed by the pistil, and is abso- minded sea captain father, had even permitted lutely necessary to the production of perfect her to learn Latin along with her brothers. When seed, which system has since been exploded, Sarah and Abba were not botanizing, their heads and proved to have been but a fanciful idea of would be close together over the Aeneid, for that great botanist."8 John Allyn, Abba’s father and Duxbury’s minis- She praised Linnaeus for "making the number ter and schoolteacher, also believed m educating and situation of the stamens and pistils the daughters as well as sons. Sarah found another ground of distinction between the classes, mentor in Judge John Davis, a Boston neighbor orders, &c" and for reducing the number of whose avocation was natural history. He wel- classes, "which were before very numerous comed Sarah to his library and his extensive depending on differences in the leaves &c of 19 vegetables." However, she thought that "[t]he young people in epistolary form. The British idea of sexual distinction in plants, forming so author Priscilla Wakefield, for example, used striking an analogy between the animal and veg- the device of letters between two teenage sis- etable lcmgdoms, giving so important a part in ters, Felicia and Constance, one of whom is the economy of vegetation, to the dust of the learning botany and explaining her lessons to anthers, which otherwise appears entirely use- the other. 14 Whether or not Sarah had read the less to the plant, so caught the imagination of American edition of Wakefield (1811), she was Linnaeus, that he overlooked difficulties in the as eager as the young woman in the book to way of his favorite system, which have since share her discoveries. been proved conclusive arguments against it."9 "I warn you before you begin you will hear Indeed, the Scottish professor Charles Alston, nothing except de classe et ordine et genere, for among others, disputed Linnaeus’s claim that there prevaileth hereabouts a kind of Botanic the "dust of the anthers" was essential to repro- mania," Sarah wrote. She had obtained "our duction in plants and mstead likened pollen to great desideratum a work almost wholly con- excrement, thrown off by the plant as superflu- fined to Genera and species, so that if I find a ous.’° Sarah would soon learn, however, that flower whose name is unknown to me, I have Linnaeus’s system had not been "exploded." only to turn to the page where its particular In this instance and in others that follow, it class and order (whatever they may be) are writ- is interesting to see the scientific controversies ten above after the manner of a dictionary, and of the time from the viewpoint of this young compare it with the descriptions of the several devotee. Genera under that class, which are so exact that In 1813, though longing to return to the it is almost impossible to mistake them, and woods and fields of Duxbury, Sarah was recon- when I find one agreeing with it exactly, I have ciled to spending the summer in Boston by her its Generic name, I then turn to that Genus in father’s offer to take her to a series of botanical another volume on species and find its common lectures by William Dandridge Peck. "[T]hey or trivial name as botanists say, its properties, commence next week," she wrote excitedly the places where it usually grows &c."’s to Abba, "and we are besides to have the privi- Sarah shared her new knowledge of willow lege of visiting the Botanic garden as often as trees ("which you know are of the class we please."" Dioecia"), giving a meticulous description of Professor Peck, appointed to Harvard’s newly the blossoms, including "a nectarium scarcely created chair in natural history, was also direc- discernable to the naked eye but very plainly tor of the Botanic Garden, bounded by the seen with the help of that microscope we had present Linnaean, Garden, and Raymond Streets last summer." She urged Abba to examine the and augmented by a gift of land from the adjoin- willows in Duxbury and instructed her further ing Andrew Craigie estate. 12 According to Peck, about the nectarium "which varies very much the garden was "intended for the cultivation of in different flowers and in some makes almost plants from various parts of the world, to facili- their whole bulk, as in the Columbme, which tate the acquisition of botanical knowledge.

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