Journals and letters, translated from the original French, bring
Michaux's work to modern readers and scientists. Known to today's
biologists primarily as the 'Michx,' at the end of more than 700
plant names, AndrE Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under
the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to search out
and grow new, rare, and never-before-described plant species and
ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry,
agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries
and published them in his two landmark books, Histoire des chEnes
de l'AmErique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized
from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the
first account of all plants known in eastern North America.
Straddling the fields of documentary editing, history of the early
republic, history of science, botany, and American studies, AndrE
Michaux in North America: Journals and Letters, 1785-1797 is the
first complete English edition of Michaux's American journals. This
copiously annotated translation includes important excerpts from
his little-known correspondence as well as a substantial
introduction situating Michaux and his work in the larger
scientific context of the day. To carry out his mission, Michaux
traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay and west to the Mississippi
River on nine separate journeys, all indicated on a finely
rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the
many hardships - debilitating disease, robberies, dangerous wild
animals, even shipwreck - that Michaux endured on the North
American frontier and on his return home. But they also convey the
soaring joys of exploration in a new world where nature still
reigned supreme, a paradise of plants never before known to Western
science. The thrill of discovery drove Michaux ever onward, even
ultimately to his untimely death in 1802 on the remote island of
Madagascar.
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