The Travels of Peter Kalm, Finnish-Swedish Naturalist Through Colonial North America 1748-1751

When Peter Kalm first beheld the banks of the Delaware River from a ship’s deck in September 1748, it marked the beginning moment of an historic undertaking to collect plant and animal specimens for the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus.   In the course of his travels, Kalm would provide his mentor with nearly 400 dried herbarium specimens, contributing importantly to Linnaeus’s key work, Species plantarum, that established the modern system of botanical nomenclature.  He would also be the first scientist to describe Niagara Falls.

Paula Ivaska Robbins’s biography details the travels that took Peter Kalm from colonial Philadelphia through New Jersey and New York and into British and French Canada, based on the explorer’s own writings.

“Today, one can visit the Linnean Society at Burlington House in London and examine the actual Kalm specimens used by Linnaeus to name many of his American plants.  For me, it is a bit humbling to touch a leaf or examine a flower collected by Kalm in the wilds of America, brought to Europe, and studied by Linneaus.  It is a reminder that most of my knowledge of American plants is based, on a considerable degree, on the efforts of those who lived generations ago in a time and under circumstances I hardly can comprehend.  Now, in this book, one can gain a feeling for the man, Peter Kalm, and not just admire the surviving dried plant specimens he labored to bring to the Master.” — from the Preface by James L. Reveal, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland; Honorary Curator, The New York Botanical Garden