44 Rhodora . [Marcu 
fession, but he could not give up his music entirely; he played the 
organ in church, and directed his choir to the last. But work which 
did not confine him to fixed hours was still in his power, and such 
occupation he took up with unfailing courage. His indomitable 
spirit was never impaired by his semi-invalidism, and work of lasting 
value for the Manchester Institute mentioned elsewhere in this paper, 
was begun and carried on through the rest of his life, and this courage 
and persistence in work were lighted up with a gaiety and delightful 
humor which pervaded and sweetened everything which he said or 
wrote. 
The summer of 1911 with its long heated term was very trying to 
Mr. Batchelder and he weakened under it; he went with his wife and 
her sister to the Isles of Shoals, a favorite resort of his; he enjoyed 
his stay there, but the sea level did not agree with him. They went 
next to another loved locality, Chocorua, amongst the Sandwich 
mountains, where he had spent eight happy summers. Here too he 
had great joy, although unable to walk beyond the house grounds. 
They came home the 15th of September, and for a week he seemed to 
have regained some strength; after that a slight shock from which 
he was too weak to rally, proved the beginning of the end. He lived 
two weeks longer gradually sinking, but with his mind clear to the last, 
and on the 11th of October he passed away as peacefully as he had 
lived. : 
Although Mr. Batchelder had been interested in botany during 
his college days, it was not until the death of his daughter in 1887 
that, as a mental diversion, he took up serious botanical work. He 
then began the accumulation of a private herbarium to represent his 
region of the Merrimac Valley. Soon after the formation in 1898 of 
the Manchester Institute of Science he presented his herbarium to 
the Institute. In 1902 this collection, together with a large number of 
additions made to it by Mr. Batchelder, was destroyed by fire, but 
immediately thereafter he set to work upon a new herbarium. This, 
at the time of his death, comprised 3,500 sheets. In 1900, in the 
Proceedings of the Manchester Institute, he published his Preliminary 
List of Plants growing without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Manchester, 
. New Hampshire, followed in 1901 and 1902 by Additions to the Prelimi- 
nary List of Plants, and in 1909 by a complete revision of the Prelimi- 
nary List; a work which will always be used by students of geographic 
distribution with the assurance that it was based upon accurate 
