Note 532 — Chapter III · (continued 2)

Doc. Hist. N. Y., i. 377; iv. 109. Colden was a Scotchman (born in 1688), who, after completing his studies at the University of Edinburgh, came to Pennsylvania in 1708, where he practised as a physician, and gathered the material for describing in the Acta Upsaliensia several hundred American plants. For a few years after 1715 he was in England; but when Hunter came to New York as governor in 1720, he made Colden surveyor-general and councillor, and ever after he was actively identified with New York. There is a likeness of Colden in Ibid., iii. 495. The Colden Papers are in the library of the N. Y. Historical Society. A portion of them are the correspondence of Colden with Smith, the historian of New York, and with his father, respecting alleged misstatements in Smith’s History, particularly as regards a scheme of Gov. Clarke to settle Scotch Highlanders near Lake George. These letters were printed in the Collections of that society, second series, vol. ii. (1849) p. 193, etc., and another group of similar letters makes part of vol. i. (p. 181) of the Publication Fund Series of the same Collections. (See Vol. III. p. 412.) The main body, however, of the Colden Papers occupy vols. ix. and x. of this last series (1876 and 1877). The earlier of these volumes contains his official letter-books, 1760-1775, which “throw a flood of light upon the measures which were steadily forcing New York into necessary resistance to arbitrary government.” The succeeding volume takes the next ten years down to 1775.