"Their hair is always curled. They spend all their fortunes and more", on fancy clothing, despite having to catch up with last year's fashions from France.
"One of the first questions they propose to a stranger is whether he is married", said the writer.

The second consideration that appears to have occurred to the writer was whether these girls appeared to be prettier than those whom he had left behind, at home. Home was Sweden, the young man in question of Swedish-Finnish heritage.

And then it occurred to him to think of something else: "And the third, whether he will take one home with him?"

The single women of Montreal, he wrote, were jealous that the ships coming from France made their first landing in Quebec where the girls there were enabled to be first to scoop up husbands fresh off the incoming boats.

The writer was Pehr Osbeck, a Swedish explorer and naturalist. His journey through New France, tasked with the mission as an apostle of Carl Linnaeus, the botanist who first introduced taxonomy (the classification and naming of natural species) to the world of biological science of discovering the presence of hitherto-unknown and unnamed species of growing things.


And the year was 1749.

	Osbeckia named for the Swedish explorer and naturalist Pehr Osbeck.