Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CADWALADER COLDEN 1688-1776 Coldenia procumbens—LINNAEUS A link in the botanic chain is a young Scotch doctor, " a truly great philosopher and a very great and ingenious botanist," who came to be Lieutenant Governor of New York. This was Cadwalader, son of the Rev. Alexander Colden, minister in Dunse, near Edinburgh, born February 17, 1688. His father, probably a learned and leisured man, personally directed the boy's education, then sent him to Edinburgh University, where he graduated M. D., in 1705. During the three following years he devoted his attention " to medicine and mathematical science"—in the quiet little town of Dunse I should imagine. The news which came, from time to time, of William Penn's colony found an eager hearkener in young Colden, and the next definite information is that he practised successfully in Pennsylvania from 1708 to 1715. Possibly about this time he recalled the great facilities for studying and gaining experience in surgical work which existed in London and Edin- CADWALADER GOLDEN (From a painting in the possession of C. D. Golden) burgh, and he may have wanted to freshen his wits and also to see his friends—one friend in particular, Alice Christie, whom he married the year of his arrival in England, at Kelso, November u, 1715. There must have been great lamentation in the families of Christie and Colden when, the following year, young Cadwalader decided to return to America and take his Alice with him. Doubtless he also took cases of books, instruments and drugs when he embarked for the tedious voyage of some months' duration. While in London he was introduced to Dr. Edmund Halley, who was so impressed with a paper Colden had written on Animal Secretions that he had him read it before the Royal Society, and made the writer a...