IRbodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 26. March, 1924. No. 303. 
MISS DAY. 
B. L. ROBINSON. 
(With portrait.) 
Mary Anna Day, for thirty-one years librarian of the Gray Her- 
barium, died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 27, 1924, in 
her seventy-second year. She never regarded herself as a botanist 
—indeed, she always approached the identification even of the com- 
monest plants with much diffidence—yet from her extraordinary 
familiarity with botanical literature, keen interest in the progress 
and history of botany, and long service in close and helpful relation 
to botanical research she became a notable figure in American science. 
It is customary to seek explanation of special talent in some marked 
personal taste, innate urge, early training, or at least in favorable 
environment during formative years. In most cases such contri- 
buting influences can doubtless be found. It was not so with Miss 
Day, and her long and successful career becomes the more remarkable 
from the fact that she lived more than half her life without the slight- 
est impulse toward any natural science or the least foreknowledge 
that botanical literature was to become the subject of her chief interest 
and for many years of her unremitted activity. 
She was born, of colonial ancestry, in the little hill town of Nelson 
in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, October 12, 1852. She was 
the daughter of Sewell and Hannah (Wilson) Day.' In personality 
she is said to have inherited many traits from her mother's side and 
1 It is learned from her relatives that Miss Day was christened Mary Annah, but 
in maturity she usually indicated her middle name merely by an initial and on the 
rare occasions when it was written out spelled it without the final hi 
