the necessary directions for its progress. And any persons who may be hereafter inclined to settle upon this promising land, may hear of frequent opportunities of going thither at the great sea ports nearest to their abode, such as London, Bristol, Liverpool, &c. where ships will be freighted to St. John’s River, on which my plantation is situated, or to St. Augustine, which is about thirty-five miles from it.”

Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was one of the source books used by Barton. On page 22, Jefferson’s opinion is anonymously quoted on a tumulus or barrow in which were buried the bones of a human being by the Indians, and a footnote explains his identity: Mr. Jefferson. See a valuable work, entitled, Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the Year 1781, &c. a new edition of which is now in the press, and will probably be shortly published. It contains a fund of curious and important information concerning the natural, civil, and political state, &c. of Virginia, and of other parts of North America.

Other references to Jefferson and quotations from the Notes on the State of Virginia occur. Reference is made also to a number of the books on travel in the United States to be found in this Catalogue. These include the works of Pehr Kalm, Jonathan Carver, Louis Hennepin, William Robertson and others.

Benjamin Smith Barton, 1766-1815, physician and naturalist, wrote these Observations when a student of medicine in Great Britain, where he studied in Edinburgh and in London. In his Advertisement at the beginning he states that it is “the production of a very young man, and were written chiefly as a recreation from the laborious studies of medicine, during a bad state of health . . .” His original intention was to publish a work in four parts, of which this was the first. No more was ever published. For other works by Barton, a friend of Jefferson and a nephew of David Rittenhouse, see the Index.

For the work by the Marquis de Chastellux see no. 4021.

Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, 1754-1793, French social reformer, was a friend of Jefferson, who was living in Paris at the time this book was published. It seems probable though it cannot be proved that Brissot de Warville gave Jefferson a copy. For other works by him see the Index.