Geological And Natural History Survey Of North Carolina: Botany : Containing A Catalogue Of The Indigenous And Naturalized Plants Of The State, Part 3
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Geological And Natural History Survey Of North Carolina: Botany : Containing A Catalogue Of The Indigenous And Naturalized Plants Of The State, Part 3
Moses Ashley Curtis
Printed at N.C. Institution for Deaf and Dumb and Blind, 1867
Science; Life Sciences; Botany; Botany; Science / Earth Sciences / Geology; Science / Life Sciences / Botany
Moses Ashley Curtis was a noted American botanist, minister.
Background
Moses Ashley Curtis was born May 11, 1808 at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the son of Thankful Ashley, a daughter of General Moses Ashley, and of Rev. Jared Curtis, who was afterward for many years chaplain of the state prison at Charlestown, Massachusetts.
Education
In the private school kept by his father he prepared for Williams College, from which he was graduated in 1827.
Career
Three years afterward (October 1830), he went to Wilmington, North Carolina, as tutor in the family of Governor Dudley.
In 1833 he returned to Massachusetts, where he began to study for the ministry.
From 1837 to 1839 he taught in the Episcopal School at Raleigh, which he left, on account of his health, to recuperate in the mountains, where he acquainted himself more thoroughly with the flora of the montane region of the state than any one had ever done.
In 1840 he was called to mission work in Washington, North Carolina, and early in 1841 removed to Hillsboro where he lived till his death, with the exception of the years 1847-56 when he took the pastorate at Society Hill, S. C.
His botanical interests were, he hints, first awakened by Prof. A. A. Eaton’s lectures at Williams. It is not clear how he acquired the training necessary to have produced so remarkable a paper as his first, the “Enumeration of Plants Growing Spontaneously Around Wilmington, N. C. ” (Boston Journal National History, May 1835).
This survey of the coastal plain vegetation within two miles of Wilmington revealed that he in a very short time had discovered almost as many flowering plants as were then known from the entire state of Massachusetts; but included only the higher or flowering plants.
At that time the lower phyla, especially the fungi, algas, lichens, etc. , were receiving scant attention. As early as 1845 Curtis had begun to collect lichens for Tuckerman of New England, and his lichen studies soon led into the wider field of all the fungi.
Before long he was in communication with Fries of Upsala, Sweden, with Ravenel of South Carolina, and with A. W. Chapman, who dedicated to him his Flora of the Southern United States.
He lived in and explored precisely the same country that had been known to Schweinitz only a few years before, yet he was able to discover a large number of new species, to be of notable service to Fries, and to collect an unusual mycological herbaria in the western world.
These specimens were ultimately purchased by Farlow of Harvard, Peck of the New York State Museum, and Bessey of Nebraska, and form collections of great historical value.
His correspondence with Berkeley of England began in 1847 and resulted in a personal and scientific friendship of great value to science.
The North American Fungi, which was published after his death, was quite as much the work of Curtis as of the better-known British botanist.
His matchless collections, as well as his acumen in the discovery of new species and his full notes, were indispensable to the first-hand authenticity and completeness of the publication.
In 1860 he published his Geological and Natural History Survey of North America, Part III, Botany; Containing a Catalogue of the Plants of the State, with Descriptions and History of the Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines; and followed this, in 1867, with a work of similar title “containing a catalogue of the indigenous and naturalized plants of the state, ” probably the most complete and scholarly state flora that had been published. Besides the usual list of flowering plants, the fungi received a careful attention unusual in those times.
The publication of the latter work was long delayed by the Civil War, to which Curtis makes one of his few allusions in the introduction, as “more important matters of national interest. ” Like the evolution controversy, the great military conflict seems scarcely to have touched his tranquil nature, given as it was to religion and science which for him transcended all animosities.
Achievements
As a botanist, Curtis explored the southern Appalachian Mountains, embarking on a major expedition in 1839. He maintained a herbarium of dried specimens and contributed specimens to John Torrey and Asa Gray. He collected lichens for Edward Tuckerman and corresponded with many other botanists, including mycologist Miles Joseph Berkeley to whom he sent many specimens with descriptions and notes.
For the last twenty-five years of his life, he studied and became an authority on mycology.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Views
He was fervent in his belief, that the starving condition of the Southern armies and peoples could have been relieved by a better knowledge of the edible fungi, and he prepared a volume on the subject, which remains in manuscript in the hands of his descendants.
Connections
On December 3, 1834 he married Mary de Rosset of Wilmington.