Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Igolino, Giuseppe

IGOLINO, Giuseppe (e-go-le'-no), Italian bot- anist, b. in Florence in 1759; d. there in 1833. He came to the United States in 1803 on a scien- tific mission, and remained till 1807 as Italian vice-consul in North Carolina. He sent to Europe several cases of seeds, and discovered some new gramineals, which he described afterward in his " Agrostographia " (Florence, 1824). He was re- lieved from his consular duties in 1807, but two years later was appointed consul at Buenos Ayres. During his stay in the United States his attention was called to the Mexican hieroglyphs, which had already occupied the attention of many distin- guished men of science, and it is asserted that he found a key to them, but lost the manuscript among others when he was shipwrecked in the Straits of Bonifacio on his return to Genoa in 1808. He was the first European to study the an- thropology of America, and thus led the way to the work of Darwin, Boyer. De Quatrefages, and Brasseur de Bourbourg. During his stay in South America in 1809-19, Igolino formed a rich collec- tion of plants and engravings of animals and in- sects peculiar to those latitudes, studying also the cryptogamic plants of Brazil. He published "Plantas cryptogamae Brasilia?" (Florence, 1829), and read several papers before the Academy of Florence on the "Effects of the Colored Upas," and on the several species of strychnia peculiar to South America. See " Vita illustrissimi Giuseppe Igolino " (Florence, 1841).