ABSTRACT
One of the major figures in colonial science was a London merchant who made his counting house the hub of transatlantic scientific communication by receiving letters, reports, and samples of American flora and fauna, and passing them along to scientists all over England and the continent. The importance of this merchant, Peter Collinson, points to the main enterprise of colonial science, which in the eighteenth century was still mostly concerned with gathering information about the new lands. The New World had been from the first an object of enormous scien tific interest. By the early eighteenth century, American-born or permanent settlers had taken over the roles of collector, surveyor, and explorer. Through Collinson, John Bartram, a farmer and botanist living outside Philadelphia, received a royal pension to collect seeds and plants. Benjamin Franklin carried over a few boxes of these on a trip to London. Jared Eliot, Thomas Jefferson, Cadwallader Colden, John Logan, John Mitchell-virtually all educated farmers in the colonies engaged in some form of botanical research-sent their findings to Europe. At one point, Jefferson dispatched an entire elk to the Count de Buffon in Paris.
