MANASSEH CUTLER.

establishment of the professorship and garden at Cambridge. The Massachusetts Society for promoting Agriculture also aided the garden project.

In 1805 the present Botanic Garden was established; and William Dandridge Peck became the first incumbent of the chair of Natural History, which he held for seventeen years. A student and an ingenious mechanic, Professor Peck was especially interested in insects, and his influence upon the botany of his time was not marked. After his death Harvard was too poor for twenty years to fill his chair; but Thomas Nuttall, a distinguished naturalist of English birth, was called to the curatorship of the Botanic Garden, and remained in that post until 1828. A printer by trade, Nuttall's love of travel and of natural history had led him a roving life. Except for his six years at Cambridge, his headquarters during thirty-six years' residence in America were in Philadelphia. During this time he travelled in all parts of the country, and discovered great numbers of new plants. He was essentially a descriptive naturalist, and possessed nice power of discrimina

tion. He published an "Introduction to Botany" (Boston, 1827), which contains a few chapters on the anatomy of plants, but is chiefly devoted to the description of the flower and of the Linnæan classification based on its parts. He seems to have regarded botany for the ordinary student as merely a pretty amusement, a notion which his presentation of the subject certainly justifies, and which has not yet disappeared from the public mind. Of his stay in Cambridge the late Dr. A. P. Peabody has written:

"His name was mythical to the members of the college. We used to hear of him as the greatest of naturalists; but I never knew of his being seen. . . . I think that the catalogue promised instruction by him to those who wanted it; but I never heard of his having a pupil."

Curiously enough, the chief native New England botanist among the contemporaries of Peck and Nuttall was never a teacher of natural history. Many a Bostonian not yet old remembers the charming personality of Dr. Jacob Bigelow. Born in Sudbury, Mass., he was graduated at Harvard in 1806, and from its Medical School in 1810. For forty years after 1815 he was Professor of Materia Medica in the same school, a position for which, says Dr. Peabody, "he had very much the same qualification that a learned. unbeliever might have for a professorship of Christian theology. No other man of his time had so little faith in drugs." How much New England patients of two and three generations ago owe to such an influence in the training of their practitioners is beyond calculation. He held also the Rumford chair of Applied Science at Cambridge from 1816 to 1827, and his lectures on this foundation were among the great attractions of the college course. As the chief member of the first committee on the American Pharmacopoeia, as the leading spirit in the establishment of Mount Auburn cemetery, and in all good works, he was widely known. A finished classical scholar, he was among the first to

depreciate the value of the classics in a practical education, as compared with technical and scientific training. His botanical fame rests on two works. The "Florula Bostoniensis," the first published key to the plants of the vicinity of Boston, appeared in 1814, and new editions were required in 1824 and 1840. It is not easy to overestimate the influence of this classic work in creating an interest in the botany of the widening region covered by its successive editions, or fully to appreciate now the labor involved, and the enthusiasm which sustained it, in the collection of the data for its preparation. The "American Medical Botany," published in three volumes between 1817 and 1820, was long the standard

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thority on our officinal plants. Among the contributors of local material for the "Florula" may be men

lege in 1799. lege in 1799. He then studied law, but, after a series of reverses and misfortunes, determined to devote himself to natural history. Pursuing its study, partly at Yale, he began lecturing on botany and geology at Williams in 1817. By this means, combined with the teaching of private pupils and other lecturing, he supported himself until made, in 1824, Senior Professor in the Rensselaer Polytech

He

nic Institute, at Troy, which position he retained up to his death, in 1842. was the author of various textbooks and of the most widely used "Manual of Botany" of his time. This appeared in its first edition almost simultaneously with the publication of Dr. Bigelow's "Florula"; and its eighth and last edition, called "North American Botany," with Dr. Bigelow's last, marks the year 1840 as the date of the final appearance of the Linnæan hand-books. Professor Eaton was to the end a strong opponent of the natural system which was gradually replacing the artificial one to which he clung, and for which the latter was intended by its author only as a temporary substitute. He was one of the numerous disciples of Linnæus who outdid their master in devotion to his system, because without his insight into the true principles of classification. His conception of the botanist is shown in the following explicit statement of

tioned Dr. Andrew Nichols, of South Danvers (now Peabody), a pupil of Dr. Waterhouse, and Dr. George Osgood, of Danvers,-enthusiastic amateurs when such were few.

Contemporary with Nuttall and Bigelow were two botanists of western Massachusetts, who belong equally to New York. Amos Eaton, our first professional teacher of natural history, and especially of botany, was a native of New York state. After experience as a blacksmith's apprentice, he was finally graduated from Williams Col

notions diametrically opposed to those of Dr. Waterhouse:

"No one should ever be employed as a teacher of Botany, unless he can give his pupils at sight the names of at least four hundred species of indigenous plants, growing in the vicinity of his school; and he ought to be able to recognize from the mere habits of plants six or eight hundred species."

But while this most pernicious feature of Professor Eaton's teaching has been so extensively perpetuated in that of the present, its best aspect has been

AMOS EATON.

as largely lost sight of. Near the end of his life he wrote to teachers of botany:

"If you have any respect for yourselves, or for human science, I beg that you will never lend your aid in that public imposition which has, within the last dozen years, degraded and debased the study of botany. I mean that of pretending to teach practical botany by school lessons, without having each student hold in his hand a system of plants and living specimens for perpetual demonstration. . . . It is true that pictures may be studied; so may the picture of a blacksmith shoeing a horse be studied. can you become a blacksmith by studying this picture?"

But

It is only in the last few years that this

warning has begun to be less needed than half a century ago.

Chester Dewey was born in Sheffield, Mass., and was graduated at Williams in 1806. After the study of theology and ordination as a minister, a preliminary then thought almost essential to fitness for any college. chair, he became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in his alma mater in 1810, lecturing also in medical schools of the vicinity. In 1850, he became Professor of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy in the University of Rochester, N. Y., and there he died in 1867. His botanical work was done outside of his professional duties, and he is known as a critical student of our grasses and sedges. He also did a part of the botanical work of the Natural History Survey of Massachusetts, preparing the "Report on the herbaceous flowering plants" of the state.

New England claims a large interest in the brothers Boott, "gentlemen of the old school" in the best sense. Born in Boston of English parents, and Harvard graduates, their lives were spent apart. Dr. Francis Boott settled in London, and was for thirtyfive years before his death, in 1863, one of its best known practitioners of medicine. He devoted himself with zeal to the elucidation of the great sedge-genus Carer, and the classic illustrations of its species published at his own expense are his best and most enduring monument. After he died, his brother, William Boott, a lifelong resident of Boston, "by a sort of noblesse oblige," took up the study of the sedges and, though publishing little, became recognized as an authority second only to the elder brother.

The beautiful Connecticut valley inspired and was made famous by the work of one of those "self-made" men who, fortunate in their inheritance and in their environment, have the genius to guide their development to the highest results. After a youth of hard work without opportunity for regular college training, and after a service of

a few years as a country minister, Edward Hitchcock became, in 1821, Professor of Chemistry and Natural History in Amherst College. Here he served with singular disinterestedness to the end of his life, in 1864. From 1845 to 1854 he was president of the college, returning to the ranks of the faculty when the emergency which had demanded this service was past. Preeminent as a geologist, he is perhaps best known for his work on the fossil footprints of the Connecticut valley sandstones. He published in 1829 a "Catalogue of Plants growing within twenty miles of Amherst College," which may be regarded as the forerunner of the numerous similar lists since prepared for various regions. He was one of the first American writers to give more than perfunctory attention to the simpler flowerless plants. His list of plants of the Linnæan class Cryptogamia, although it now seems meagre enough, shows his knowledge of the whole field of botany to have been better than that of most botanists of the time. He also prepared the first "Report on the Animals and Plants of Massachusetts," in addition to one on the Geology of the state. When, after these first reports, the work of the Natural History Survey was divided among a number of specialists, Mr. George B. Emerson shared the botanical work with Professor Dewey of Williams College, taking the woody plants as his subject. Mr. Emerson was a native of Maine, a graduate of Harvard, and for over thirty years the principal of the best private school for girls in Boston.

a leading spirit in every attempt to give dignity to the teacher's profession and to elevate the standard of fitness for its members, the whole country owes him a lasting debt. His interest in plants dates from his acquaintance with Dr. Cutler's paper in his early youth. To the preparation of his "Report on the Trees and Shrubs growing naturally in the forests of Massachusetts" he devoted all his leisure for nine years. He personally explored the state from

BY PERMISSION OF THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
EDWARD HITCHCOCK.

end to end, despising no source of information; and the result was a volume which must remain classic. It was published at Boston in 1846, and a beautiful second edition, with colored plates, followed in 1875. Mr. Emerson had a genuine love of the woods, and clearly saw the practical value to the state of their wise management. At a time when, to the ordinary observer, the supply of timber seemed limitless, he wrote:

"Now those old woods are everywhere falling. The axe has made, and is making, wanton and terrible havoc. The cunning foresight of the Yankee seems to desert him when he takes the axe in hand. The new settler clears in a year more acres than he can cultivate in ten, and destroys at a single burning many a winter's fuel, which would better be kept in reserve for his grandchildren."

If he felt constrained to speak thus fifty years ago, what would he say to-day, when the same reckless policy which he lamented has brought close home to us the problem of future wood supply, and when our stateliest and most important forests are fast falling into the hands of men as soulless

as their steam saw-mills! It is to Mr. Emerson's book that we owe the beautiful Bouvé collection of woods in the museum of the Boston Society of Natural History; and it was largely through his personal influence that his father-in-law endowed the Arnold Arboretum at Jamaica Plain, now one of the foremost forestry establishments of the world, which is none the less his memorial that it does not bear his name.

One of the most enthusiastic and promising of the New England botanists of two generations ago was William Oakes, of Ipswich. A graduate of Harvard in 1820, he became disgusted with the law after admission to the bar, and thenceforward devoted himself to the study of New England plants. He visited every part of our territory and repeatedly explored the more interesting mountain regions, having planned an elaborate Flora, for which he accumulated an enormous mass of material. But his anxiety for perfection in his work delayed its completion; and finally his death by drowning in 1848 lost to science his

WILLIAM OAKES.

GEORGE B. EMERSON.

accurate and discriminating knowledge. It is related of Oakes that a woman who had watched him for half an hour on his knees near her house, searching for a rare moss, thought him crazy and, in the kindness of her heart, brought him a slice of bread and butter.

His friend and companion on many trips, Dr. Charles Pickering, was of Salem ancestry, a grandson of Col. Timothy Pickering. He was graduated at the Harvard Medical School in 1826, and practised for several years in Philadelphia. In 1838 he sailed, with the Wilkes Exploring Expedition to the South Pacific as one of its naturalists, giving especial attention to the geographical distribution of plants and animals. On the return of the expedition, he made a journey of several years in eastern countries for study. His chief works are one on geographical distribution, published in part by the government, and a "Chronological History of Plants, Man's Record of his own existence," a wonder of learning and of patience, covering 1222 closely printed quarto pages and tracing the migrations and transportations of plants as shown by existing historic records, from the beginning of the first great year of the Egyptian reckoning, with citations in the original lan