Ohio History Journal

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OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY--PART 6

OHIO MEDICAL HISTORY--PART 6

 

THE VAULTING IMAGINATION OF JOHN L. RIDDELL*

 

By ADOLPH E. WALLER

 

Whatever makes the past or future predominate over the present exalts

us in the scale of thinking beings.--Johnson.

The name of John Leonard Riddell is, perhaps, best remem-

bered today for his Synopsis of the Western Plants. In 1835,

when this was published, Cincinnati was the western-most city of

great size, with around 35,000 inhabitants, and with immediate,

perhaps daily, expansion in commerce and culture. In 1830,

Cincinnati had less than 25,000 while Columbus, the second in

size, had 3,400. The West, spelled with a capital, meant almost

unlimited opportunities for hardy souls from the Atlantic States,

who, crossing the mountains from Virginia, New England and

Pennsylvania, all converged in the Ohio Valley.

Riddell's Synopsis of the Western Plants is the most im-

portant catalog of plants written by a resident botanist west

of the Appalachians of that period. It antedates by three years

the first volume of the Flora of North America, on which Drs.

John Torrey and Asa Gray were laboring. Dr. Daniel Drake, in

1815, in his Picture of Cincinnati devotes a brief section to botany.

So it is probable that Drake himself, during Riddell's connection

with the Cincinnati College, harried Riddell into the publication

of his somewhat regional summary. In a paragraph signed by

"The Editor" in the July, 1834, number of the Western Journal

of the Medical and Physical Sciences, Drake introduces the article

"Particular Directions for Collecting and Preserving Specimens

of Plants," by Riddell, as follows:

We hope he will append to his practical directions a catalogue of

such plants of the State of Ohio as may have fallen under his observation.

He is, we feel assured, a sound practical botanist, who may, perhaps, do

for Ohio, sooner or later what Professor Short is zealously laboring to

effect for Kentucky. By the way, why does not the Professor bring out the

 

* Papers from the Department of Botany, the Ohio State University, No. 485.

331