Jane Colden has been called the first woman to master the Linnaean system of botany. After learning taxonomy from her father, Cadwallader Colden, in the mid 1750s, she identified specimens native to the lower Hudson Valley and collected their names, with descriptions and drawings, in her Botanic Manuscript, published in part in 1963. Her manuscript catalogue, which did not circulate widely, nonetheless secured her reputation on both sides of the Atlantic among prominent colleagues who held up the daughter of Cadwallader Colden as an example to her sex. Such deserved recognition proved short-lived, however. Her marriage in 1759 brought the end of her study, and she died in 1766. The course of Jane Colden's career is an important indicator of the opportunities and limitations that women faced in neoclassical science. Botany did not become popular among Englishwomen until the 1760s and among American women until the early nineteenth century, making Colden...