Cadwallader Colden was one of the many young Scottish doctors, merchants, lawyers, and ministers who sought their fortunes in eighteenth-century America; by the time of his death at the age of eighty-eight he had played a prominent role in the government of colonial New York, had accumulated a comfortable estate, and had become a member of the international scientific community as well as one of early America's leading scientists. An industrious writer, he left behind papers that eventually would fill nine volumes of the collections of the New York Historical Society, but his chief claim to literary remembrance rests on his authorship of the first full-length history in English of the Iroquois or Five Nations.

The son of a Berwickshire clergyman, he was himself sent to the University of Edinburgh to be educated for the ministry, but he decided to become a physician instead and after his graduation...