A Philadelphia friend, for whom Franklin entertained a peculiar affection, was John Bartram, the botanist. "Our celebrated Botanist of Pennsylvania," Franklin deservedly terms him in a letter to Jan Ingenhousz. In one letter Franklin addresses him as "My ever dear friend," in another as "My good and dear old friend" and in another as "My dear good old friend." In 1751, Bartram published his _Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other Matters worthy of Notice. Made by Mr. John Bartram in his Travels from Pensilvania to Onondaga, Oswego, and the Lake Ontario, in Canada_, and, in a letter to Jared Eliot, Franklin, after mentioning the fact that Bartram corresponded with several of the great naturalists in Europe, and would be proud of an acquaintance with him, said: "I make no Apologies for introducing him to you; for, tho' a plain illiterate Man, you will find he has Merit." "He is a Man of no Letters, but a curious Observer of Nature," was his statement in a subsequent letter to the same correspondent. Through the mediation of Franklin, Bartram was made the American botanist to the King, and given a pension for the fearless and tireless search for botanical specimens, which he had prosecuted, when American forest, savannah and everglade were as full of death as the berry of the nightshade. It was the thought of what he had hazarded that led Franklin to write to him in 1769: "I wish you would now decline your long and dangerous peregrinations in search of new plants, and remain safe and quiet at home, employing your leisure hours in a work that is much wanted, and which no one besides is so capable of performing; I mean the writing a Natural History of our country." The pension meant so much to Bartram that he found difficulty in assuring himself that it would last. In one letter, Franklin tells him that he imagines that there is no doubt but the King's bounty to him would be continued, but he must continue on his part to send over now and then a few such curious seeds as he could procure to keep up his claim. In another letter, he tells him that there is no instance in the then King's reign of a pension once granted ever being taken away, unless for some great offence. Franklin himself was first of all a sower of seed, of that seed which produces the wholesome plants of benevolence and utility; so it seems quite in keeping to find him, when he was absent from America, maintaining a constant interchange of different sorts of seed with Bartram. If Bartram chooses to try the seed of naked oats and Swiss barley, six rows to one ear, he can get some, Franklin writes, by calling on Mrs. Franklin. In another letter, he acknowledges the receipt of seeds from Bartram, and, in return for it, sends him some of the true rhubarb seed which he desires; also some green dry peas, highly esteemed in England as the best for making pea soup; and also some caravances or beans, of which a cheese was made in China.