and causes of the deviations from the ordinary conformation of plants than does that of Moquin."
Engelmann spent a part of 1832 in Paris, in the study of medicine and science, along with Braun and Agassiz. Some of his relatives had determined to make investments in land in the Mississippi Valley, and one of them had settled in Illinois, near St. Louis. The others invited him to visit the country, as an agent for them, and he accepted the proposition, being moved to do so, one of his biographers suggests, by the expectation of finding in America an interesting field of botanical research. He sailed from Bremen in September, 1832, landed in Baltimore, after a voyage of six weeks, visited Philadelphia, where he made the acquaintance of the botanist Nuttall, and arrived at a friend's farm in Missouri in the middle of the ensuing winter. He resided on the farm of his uncle Fritz, near Belleville, Illinois, till the spring of 1835, when he undertook a horseback-journey through Southwestern Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, down to Louisiana. After nearly dying of fever during the summer in the swamps of Arkansas, he returned to St. Louis, then a frontier town of eight thousand inhabitants, and began the practice of medicine there in December. He combined with his medical practice, which was very successful, and became so extensive as to make him one of the leading physicians of St. Louis, botanical investigations as a side pursuit. He made collections which he sent, with his own scientific descriptions, to the European museums, and also for his own herbarium. It was through one of his herbariums, which Dr. Gray examined in Berlin, that that botanist became acquainted with Dr. Engelmann's studies; and when the latter passed through New York on his return from his marriage-journey to Kreuznach, in 1840, Dr. Gray embraced the opportunity of making his acquaintance, and formed with him a life-long friendship.
Dr. Engelmann made a second botanical excursion south, to Arkansas in 1837. His first botanical work, "A Monography of North American Cuscutinæ," or dodders, was published in 1842, in the "American Journal of Science," and made him known throughout the scientific world. Till this time only one species of dodder indigenous to the United States was known. Engelmann's monograph treated of fourteen species, all found within the Mississippi Valley, or east of it. A more systematic treatise, published in the "Transactions of the St. Louis Academy of Sciences," in 1859, after investigation of the whole genus in America and Europe, gave the characteristics of seventy-seven species.
The botanical chapter in the report of Colonel Doniphan's expedition of 1846 and 1847 to New Mexico, published by the Government in 1848, was prepared by Dr. Engelmann from material furnished by Dr. Wislizenus, his colleague in the medical profession, who was a member of the expedition.
