Collinson, Peter

(b. London, England, 28 January 1693/94; d. Mill Hill Middlesex, England, 11 August 1768),

natural history dissemination of science.

His father, also called Peter, was a haberdasher and citizen of London; his mother, Elizabeth Hall, was the daughter of a Southwark mealman. Collinson was sent at the age of two to live with his grandmother at Peckham, in Surrey, where he “received the first liking to gardens and plants.” While he was largely self-taught, such education as he had was received from Quakers, possibly in the school which Richard Scoryer established in Wandsworth, Surrey, and which later moved to Southwark.

In 1724 Collinson married Mary Russell, the daughter of a prosperous weaver and landowner. Two of their children, Michael and Mary, survived them while two sons, both named for their father, died as infants. At about the time of his marriage, Collinson and his brother, James took charge of the family business, which their mother had continued after her husband’s death in 1711. They kept shop on Gracechurch Street as mercers and haberdashers until James’s death in 1762, and then Peter continued it alone for four more years. Collinson was not a man of great wealth, although the business brought him a comfortable living until it declined in the 1760’s.

Both brothers performed duties which were expected of citizens of London. Although they were Quakers, they served as churchwardens and vestrymen in the parish of St. Benet, Gracechurch Street, which they seem to have treated as local government in avoiding purely religious functions. Peter also held offices in the Bridge Within Ward as constable and bencher and, late in life, was overseer of the poor. While James was more involved in the affairs of the Society of Friends than he, Peter was active in the work of the Society, serving from 1753 until his death as a correspondent of the London Meeting for Sufferings, the meeting most concerned with the relations of Quakers with the state. Here his contacts with political figures made him an effective lobbyist.

Collinson’s health was good, except for an occasional attack of gout. His death came as the result of a strangury which he suffered while on a visit to Thorndon Hall, the seat of Lord Petre, near Brentwood, Essex. He was buried in the Quaker burying ground on Long Lane in Bermondsey.

Collinson was, above all, a gardener who had considerable success in domesticating foreign plants. His gardens at Peckham and, after 1749, at Ridgeway House in the village of Mill Hill north of London, were noted for their exotics. One biographer credits him with the introduction or reintroduction of 180 new species into England, of which more than fifty were American.

Although eventually Collison would have a worldwide network of “philosophical” correspondents, he depended largely on American merchants, with whom he did an extensive business, to send him seeds as well as orders for dry goods. Occasionally he did find a more dependable source, such as Mark Catesby, whom Collinson helped secure patrons while the future author of the Natural History of Carolina was in America between 1722 and 1726 and whom he aided further by lending money without interest while that work was in the process of completion.

Possibly through his aid to Catesby and certainly because of his growing reputation as a collector of curiosities, Collinson moved into the circle of one of Catesby’s benefactors, Sir Hans Sloane, the greatest collector of that time and president of both the College of Physicians and the Royal Society, whose sponsorship secured his election as a fellow in 1728. For the remainder of his life, Collinson was an active participant in the affairs of the Royal Society. He rarely missed meetings from October through May, when his business kept him in London, and frequently brought “curious” visitors with him, many of whom he sponsored for membership. Unlike many of the eighteenth-century fellows, he participated often in the proceedings of the Society: making comments, reading letters from his scientific correspondents in England and abroad, and, less often, giving his own contributions. Most of the latter were insignificant, even at a time when much trivia found its way into the Philosophical Transactions.

His most important paper, “A Letter to the Honorable J. Th. Klein… Concerning the Migration of Swallows” (Philosophical Transactions, 51 [1760], 449–464), was a well-reasoned argument based on correspondence and on travelers’ accounts of migration against the commonly held belief that the birds hibernated under water. This argument, which he also sent to Linnaeus, he had to urge on the great Swedish taxonomist for years afterward. Collinson’s importance to the Society, though, lay largely in promoting its aims and activities, and to this end he served fourteen years on its council, a considerable expenditure of time for a busy mercer.

The most significant result of Collinson’s American business connections was his contact with Philadelphia’s first scientific institution, the Library Company of Philadelphia, which he served as unpaid London agent beginning in 1732. By his choice of books and instruments and by his reports of what interested his friends in the Royal Society, he was able to give direction to the scientific interests of the city which, during these years, took a central place in American cultural development. Through the company’s first secretary, Joseph Breintnall, Collinson initiated a correspondence with John Bartram of Kingsessing, Pennsylvania, which would produce one of the more fruitful botanical partnerships of the eighteenth century. Collinson secured customers for the seeds and plants which Bartram collected: first of all, Robert James, eighth Lord Petre, and, later, the dukes of Richmond, Norfolk, Bedford, and Argyll. Ultimately the list would include most of the planting lords and gentlemen of England at a time when many of them were remodeling the English landscape along naturalistic lines. This gave Collinson entree to the powerful men of his time; but he acted in all of this only for the New World plants which he received from Bartram.

Through the Library Company also, Collinson came to correspond with Benjamin Franklin, who was its first mover and most active member. While it is hardly true that Collinson was responsible for making Franklin’s reputation to the same degree that he was the creator of John Bartram as a botanical collector, nonetheless Collinson played a significant role in Franklin’s life. Collinson played a significant role in Franklin’s life. Collinson sent the company, probably in 1745, when he distributed similar materials to other correspondents, a glass tube and some accounts of German electrical experiments, which started Franklin and his associates in the Library Company on their study of electricity. Franklin transmitted his accounts of their activities to Collinson, who read some of them to the Royal Society and eventually saw to the publication of Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London, 1751–1754).

While Collinson was never again so spectacularly effective as he was with Franklin, his part in the Philadelphia experiments was typical of his place in the eighteenth-century scientific community. He was at once gadfly, middleman, and entrepreneur. In the period of his greatest activity, from the 1730’s to near the time of his death, Collinson was at the center of a network of scientific intelligence which reached from Peking to Philadelphia, but which was concerned principally with the communications of Americans with European and English savants. He informed his correspondents about those things which interested his friends in the Royal Society, transmitted their collections to English and European naturalists, and either read their letters and formal papers to the Royal Society or secured their publication in the Gentleman’s Magazine or occasionally in Continental journals. While he was engaged in this, Collinson was also active in the Society of Antiquaries, to which he was elected in 1732 and on whose council he served eight terms.

To the Antiquaries, who were closely interrelated with the Royal Society, he transmitted reports and artifacts sent him by those of his friends who were interested in archaeology and read a speculative paper, “Observations on the Round Towers of Ireland,” which was printed posthumously in the first volume of Archaeologia (pp. 329–331). He did not join Henry Baker and a number of his close associates from the Royal Society of Arts, possibly because he lacked sufficient time and resources. Nonetheless, he again shared with them both his advice and his correspondents, including the Connecticut agricultural experiments, including the Connecticut Jared Eliot, who received their gold medal for his work in metallurgy.

Virtually the only American naturalist of any significance who did not benefit from Collinson’s efforts in the period of his greatest activity was Alexander Garden of Charleston, South Carolina, who, although he corresponded with Collinson, transacted his business largely through Collinson’s friend, John Ellis, or dealt directly with Linnaeus. Collinson was involved, however, along with Mark Catesby, in the collaboration of John Clayton of Virginia with Johann Friedrich Gronovius which produced the Flora Virginica (Leiden, 1739–1743) and also contributed to the Leiden revision of 1762, even thought that edition put an end to his efforts to publish Clayton’s own expanded version in London. Collinson performed a similar service for another Virginia naturalist, John Mitchell, the future cartographer, whose botanical writings he sent to Christian J. Trew in Nuremberg, where they were published in the Acta physicomedica.

To the northward, Collinson served as the principal connection with London of James Logan of Philadelphia. Logan’s accounts of his experiments with plant hybridization passed through Collinson’s hands to publication in London and Leiden. In the case of Cadwallader Colden of New York, Collinson acted as scientific correspondent, literary agent, and, as was so often true of his American friends, as a source of influence for the acquisition of office. Collinson encouraged Colden’s botanical studies, which elicited the admiration of Linnaeus, and was responsible for the London publication of Colden’s botanical studies, which elicited the admiration of Linnaeus, and was responsible for the London publication of Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations. He tried, without success, to secure favorable English comment on Colden’s most ambitious effort, his Principles of Action in Matter. For Colden, as for many lesser Americans with scientific pretensions, Collinson was the major tie to a world of learning beyond the Atlantic.

Certainly Collinson, aided by John Ellis and others of his circle, helped to move both English and American botany in a Linnaean direction. Collinson, himself, was notably unsystematic, and had to depend upon Gronovius in Leiden, J. F. Dillenius in Oxford, and, later, upon Linnaeus’ pupil, Daniel C. Solander (whom he helped to bring to England), to name the specimens which Bartram sent him. He complained to Linnaeus of the complexity of his classification, but nevertheless helped to circulate the works of the great taxonomist in both England and America, as he also supplied him with specimens and information.

Collinson’s generous promotion of the works of others was the real source of the admiration which men of his time held for him and accounts for his election to the Uppsala and Berlin academies. In his own interests, he was very much the eighteenthcentury amateur. At his death, he left cabinets of curiosities and a wide range of notes on scientific and antiquarian subjects. His library contained one of the major collections of Americana in England, and he amassed a large amount of material on the American Indian. Collinson’s only published treatment of the Indians, however, was a typically Quaker proposal for a mild regulation of trade and settlement (Gentleman’s Magazine, 33 [1763], 419–420). As was the case with a history of American pines, which his friends expected of him, his learning was put to utilitarian purposes. In the latter (Ibid., 25 [1753], 503–504, 550–551), the practical gardener again demonstrated his concern with the adaptability of plants to the English soil and climate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Collinson’s major writings are summarized in Norman G. Brett-James, The Life of Peter Collinson (London, 1925).

II. Secondary Literature. Brett-James’s biography is marred with inaccuracy and should be supplemented with Earl G. Swem, “Brothers of the Spade….,” in American Antiquarian Society Proceedings, 68 (1948), 17–190, which also has a good treatment of secondary works on Collinson. Raymond P. Stearns, “Colonial Fellows of the Royal Society of London, 1661–1788,” in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 8 (1951), 178–246, and Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1956), contain useful materials.

George F. Frick