IRbodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 19. April, 1917. No. 220. 
REV. E. J. HILL. 
AGNES CHASE. 
(With portrait.) 
ELLSWORTH JEROME HILL was born at Le Roy, New York, Decem- 
ber 1, 1833, the son of a farmer of colonial stock from Connecticut. 
His alert mind and eagerness for knowledge made the most of the 
local facilities for education, while a love of natural history and of 
reading led to the study of geological works and of the classics. At 19, 
when about prepared to enter college, he was seized with an affection 
of the knee, causing lameness. He never afterward had good health, 
all that he accomplished being in spite of the handicap of pain and 
weakness. It was during this first period of lameness that he began 
the study of botany. His first effort to walk out of doors on crutches 
was made to secure from the orchard a few early spring flowers which 
he identified by Wood’s Botany. During the summer he thus col- 
lected and studied some two hundred specimens that are still preserved 
in his herbarium. The following year he went to Mississippi, and there 
taught in a female seminary at Grenada and later in a preparatory 
school for boys. After three years, much improved in health, he 
returned to New York where he taught for two years. In 1860 he 
entered Union Theological Seminary, graduating in the class of 1863. 
He then married and went to Homewood (near Chicago), Illinois, as 
pastor of the Presbyterian Church. In 1869 hip disease developed 
rendering him lame for several years. In consequence he resumed 
teaching, first in the high school of Kankakee, Illinois, for four years, 
then in the Englewood high school, Chicago, for eighteen years. 
