A farmer in colonial Pennsylvania, John Bartram was one of America's pioneer botanists. As he remarked in a letter (1764), he had "in thirty years' travels, acquired a perfect knowledge of most, if not all the vegetables between New England and Georgia, and from the sea-coast to Lake Ontario and Erie." He not only identified closely with the European scientific community of the eighteenth century, developed a popular botanical garden on his estate, and played a prominent role in the propagation of New World plants abroad and Old World plants at home, but he also authored numerous reports, letters, and journals pertaining to the American wilderness. Although only a few samples of Bartram's writings survive, they apparently represent his work generally. Read only in the context of other eighteenth-century nature reportage, the extant Bartram documents may not seem particularly unique or impressive, and they hardly intimate why Benjamin Franklin...