Science in the British Colonies of America

""John Banister was America's first 'resident naturalist'- the first university-trained specialist to send specimens, drawings, and descriptive Latin catalogues of plants, insects, spiders, and molluscs to leading naturalists in England. The Ewans here present a collection of Banister's works and document his place in the growth of knowledge of the natural history of the Atlantic seaboard. They shows that had his works been published, even as incomplete as they were at his death, they would have fundamentally altered the course of American botany, entomology, and malacology. In addition, Banister would have been rightly credited by anthropologists with much of the Virginia Indian lore attributed to Robert Beverley. Banister's catalogues are faithfully transcribed. His charm and talents stand out clearly, as well as his respect for 'provident Nature... who does nothing in vaine.' Because of Banister's accidental death at forty-two and the unfinished state of his writings, drawings, and collections, few of his many discoveries carry his name. Yet the Ewans reveal that his plant descriptions and drawings played a critical part in botanical systematics, having a significant influence on Linnaeus' binomials."- Publisher