Jane began identifying and describing plants at the request of her father who himself had been involved in botanical study before abandoning it for other projects. When he returned to the field in his sixties, he felt he was too old and eyesight too poor to continue and he turned to Jane to carry out the work. While it seems Cadwallader’s goals in pursuing botany had at least partly to do with securing himself a name in intellectual circles, Jane’s goals are less easy to define. Initially she seems reluctant and in her first year only described 12 plants, primarily common ones easily found nearby. This seems a weak attempt to perhaps please her ambitious father. In 1753, however, she described 140 plants, all but 8 in extensive detail and then continued to collect in swamps, woods and thickets through 1756 when the Seven Year War made in unsafe to continue. She mastered the Linnaean system and proved to have remarkable powers of observation and description surpassing her father’s efforts in both quantity and detail. In a period when gentlewomen were expected to be conversant about the new sciences primarily to provide an attentive audience, Jane took on the actual work of scientific enquiry and from all evidence, found that work thrilling.
