Dr. Charles Mohr 603 



In 1882 he was invited by the Chief of the Agricultural De- 

 partment at Washington to superintend the arrangement of the 

 Agricultural and Forestry collections which had been brought 

 together by the great railroad lines of the South and exhibited at 

 the Atlanta Exposition in 1881. This brought him into contact 

 with many scientific men with whom he contracted lasting friend- 

 ships and from that time till his death he was engaged in investi- 

 gations for the departments, especially of forestry, then in charge 

 of his friend Fernow. He was enabled to give his entire time to 

 scientific work after 1892, when he turned over to his sons the 



management of his business in Mobile. The amount of travel by 

 rail, by private conveyance and on foot, which he accomplished 

 in pushing these investigations was enormous, and to be appre- 

 ciated only by those who enjoyed his personal acquaintance, for 

 he counted no trouble too great, no hardship too severe, when 

 there was something to be determined by his personal inspection, 

 and at the age of seventy-two we find him riding all day on mule 

 back up Cheaha Mountain to establish beyond doubt that the yellow 

 pine grew at altitudes above 1,000 feet. He rarely took account 

 of the fact that his health was not robust, and often overtaxed his 

 powers, paying the penalty by being confined to his room for days. 



During his later years he was employed upon " Plant Life of 

 Alabama/' and upon monographs for the Forestry Division. That 

 °n the timber pines was published in 1896, and those on the 

 cypress, the juniper and the red cedar are now in press ; the 

 hard-wood trees were to follow next, the first of the series being 

 that on the oaks, which he had completed just before his death. 

 For our Geological Survey he had planned a second volume 

 (Plant Life of Alabama being the first) on the Economic Botany 

 °f Alabama, which was to have been a complete account of the 

 useful and noxious plants of the state. Unfortunately for us all 

 he left of this volume only the general outline and plan. 



In March, 1900, he removed to Asheville, N. C, where he 

 spent the two remaining years of his life, enjoying to the utmost 

 his botanical work, and the meetings with the botanists of the 

 country who visited that beautiful spot. The Biltmore her- 

 barium and the society of the botanists there attracted him most 

 strongly and frequent visits to the forests of the Biltmore estate 



