132 Chronicles of the Cape Fear River

tions, with the title of vice-consul. The position was not in
harmony with his tastes, but he applied himself to his tasks with
intelligence and zeal, and his rectitude and pleasing personality
won for him the esteem and affection of all. While here he
became the friend of Thomas Jefferson, then President of the
United States, and other distinguished Americans.

The rich vegetation of North Carolina, with its variety and
abundance of new and interesting specimens, furnished relief
from the more uncongenial task of observing the current price
of commodities at the port and counting the revenues that
passed through his hands. Dr. M. ‘A. Curtis, the noted botanist
of North Carolina, in the Boston Journal of Natural History,
1834, said: “It is confidently believed that no section of the
Union of equal extent contains such a rich and extensive variety
of plants as is to be found about Wilmington,” and he men-
tioned the fact that in little more than two seasons, at intervals
from other engagements, he had found more than a thousand
specimens, with much ground still unexamined. It is easy to
imagine how a man like Delile reveled in these new-found gar-
dens, and all the more because his august patroness, soon to be
the Empress Josephine, particularly requested him to collect in
America all the plants which might be of interest in France;
and the director of the establishment of Malmaison, M. de Mir-
bel, engaged him to respond as soon as possible to the commis-
sion of the future empress. Bonaparte, also, took the liveliest
interest in the plan of Josephine to naturalize foreign flora in
France, and, becoming emperor, it was his desire to bring under
one sceptre plants grown in every corner of the globe, and to
acclimatize them in the greenhouses of Malmaison. ‘“Here,” M.
Joly tells us, “flourished the violet of Parma, the rose of Da-
mascus, the lily of the Nile,” and—shall we say the marvelous
Dionea muscipula, Drosera, and Sarracenia of Carolina? De-
lile is said to have established in Wilmington an herbarium in
connection with his collection for Josephine, and his specimens
of American grains he sent to the distinguished botanist Palisot
de Beauvois, who published a classification of them in general
with other specimens in his Agrostographie. The writer of
this sketch had the good fortune to come upon a copy of the
Agrostographie corrected by Palisot himself, in which he makes
acknowledgment to those who aided in his work, and among
them Delile. It is regretted that no book of Delile’s giving an
account of the plants of Carolina is at hand. He wrote Memoire

Early Years 133

sur quelques espéces de graminees propres a la Caroline du
Nord, also, Centurie des plantes de lV Amerique du Nord, but
these are not available to the writer. At the time of his death
-he was writing on the Flora d’Amerique, which he expected to

publish soon.

Leaving Wilmington abruptly in 1806, Delile went to New

York and obtained a degree in medicine, after which he first
thought of practicing that profession in New Orleans, and then
of becoming an American planter. His mother combatted the
latter intention, however, and, reminding him of the friendship
of the Empress Josephine, emphasized the fact that it was not
necessary to be exiled from a country in which he had such good

and powerful friends. Shortly after this he was recalled to
France by a decree of the consuls to join a commission charged

with erecting a monument to science.
In 1819 he came to the chair of botany and materia medica

in the faculty of Montpellier, already made illustrious by half a
dozen of the most distinguished men of France. As director of
le jardin des plantes de Montpellier, he added lustre to his name
and to that of the establishment. The botanical gardens of
Montpellier, created in 1596 by Henry IV., were the first es-
tablished in France, and to an already bountiful collection De-
lile added treasures of the vegetable world found in Egypt and
in North Carolina and other parts of the eastern section of the
United States. His gardens seem in a measure to have been
converted by him into a department of agriculture, in which
he studied vegetation with practical intent, both for domestic
economy and for industrial development.

In the reign of Louis XVIII, he held at court the position
his father and grandfather had held—that of porte-malle—but
he soon renounced it, writing Voltaire: “It is from the court
that one ought to flee; it is in the country that one ought to live.”

In 1806 he sent from New York to a friend in France a cata-
logue of the botanical gardens established in 1801 at Elgin,
New York, by the celebrated Dr. Hosack, and in doing so dis-
cussed briefly American trees, remarking that it would be very
easy to naturalize them in France, especially the cypress of
North Carolina, the white oak, the swamp oak, the green oak of
Virginia, and the yellow oak, the last valuable to art on account
of the beautiful color extracted from its bark, and the rest for
decorating parks. He called attention in particular to the fact
that our trees are able to stand more cold in winter and heat in

summer than those of France.