The Natures of John and William Bartram
John Bartram (1699-1777), "the first native-born American to devote his entire life to the study of nature," was an eminently practical man, a scientist devoted to the rigorous description of living things. Among his subjects was the Venus flytrap, along with hundreds of species of plants and animals, fully "one quarter of all the plants identified and sent to Europe during the colonial period." His son William (1739-1823) was, by contrast, something of a dreamer, and far less methodical a scientist than was his father. Yet his lyricalTravels, an account of specimen-collecting in the Deep South, is read today, while John Bartram's work is not. Thomas Slaughter examines their lives, noting the influence both men had on Henry David Thoreau and the English Romantics, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.