Mb Halsted And John Torrey Correspondence 1844 1854 PDF Download

Correspondence from M.B. Halsted to John Torrey, dated 1844-1854. Halsted's correspondence begins shortly after his graduation from Princeton in 1843, when the younger man is living in Newburgh, New York, pursuing botanical interests, looking for direction. He expresses pleasure that Torrey has found enthusiastic botany students despite the mockery their mutual interest sometimes attracts. "I will recollect what a goodly share of [ridicule] was given me for 'picking weeds'," he writes in September of 1844. Over the ensuing years Halsted pursues a position with one of the many government-sponsored expeditions being dispatched, and eventually takes a place as an Army surgeon; in 1847, during the Mexican-American War, he writes Torrey from Mexico. In 1848 he is in New York City, again hoping for a place with an expedition-- this time the Boundary Survey-- while exchanging specimens with Mexican botanists. Halsted's last letter in the collection, dated 1854, finds him in Panama, asking Torrey for advice on the price of "crude platina," or platinum ore. Obsolete and unresolved plant names mentioned include Fragaria canadensis, Hepatica triloba, Nasturtium hispidum, and Pedicularis pallida.