Marshall, Moses, 1758-1813

Humphry Marshall

Humphry Marshall was born in West Bradford, Pennsylvania, in 1722, the eighth child of Abraham and Mary Hunt Marshall. His parents, Quaker immigrants from Derbyshire, England, provided him with only a rudimentary English education, which ceased altogether at age 12, when he was apprenticed to a stonemason. However, from very early in life, Marshall was drawn to the study of natural history and continued his education on his own, reading widely. With the encouragement of his cousin, the botanist John Bartram, Marshall developed considerable practical skill in botany and natural history, and began to cultivate friendships with other scientists in America and abroad in the 1750s. Eventually, his correspondents included the British botanists John Fothergill, Peter Collinson, Sir Joseph Banks, and John Coakley Lettsom; the American scientists Thomas Parke, Benjamin Franklin, George Logan, Joseph Storrs, Timothy Pickering, John Dickinson, and Caspar Wistar; and French scientists and plant collectors including Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, the Comtesse de Tesse, and Conrad-Alexandre Gérard; a number of German, Dutch, Swedish and Irish plant collectors and scientists.

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