ALPHEUS SPRING PACKARD. 43 



ALPHEUS SPRING PACKARD. 



By Professor A. D. Mead, 



BROWN UNIVERSITY. 



A NOTHER American naturalist of the generation and the type to 

 -£a- which belonged Leidy, Cope, Baird, Goode and Hyatt has 

 passed awaj r , Alpheus Spring Packard, professor of zoology and 

 geology at Brown University. 



His lineage of sturdy, scholarly men, his academic heritage from 

 great naturalists and the freshness of natural history in America at 

 the time he commenced his career are all perceptible in the sterling 

 quality and the wide range of his life work. The grandfather of the 

 naturalist, the Rev. Dr. Hezekiah Packard, was a revolutionary soldier 

 and fought at Bunker Hill. He received from Harvard College the 

 degrees of A.B., A.M. and D.D. and was an eminent preacher, teacher 

 and writer. The Rev. Dr. Jesse Appleton, one of the early presi- 

 dents of Bowdoin College, was Professor Packard's maternal grand- 

 father. His father, Alpheus Spring Packard, was a member of the 

 Bowdoin faculty for sixty-five years and served the college successively 

 as tutor, professor of ancient languages and classic literature, of 

 rhetoric and oratory, of natural and revealed religion; as librarian and 

 as acting president. He was an author and a revered teacher; it 

 was of him that Longfellow wrote in his Morituri Salutamus de- 

 livered at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the poet's class, 



" they all are gone 

 Into the land of Shadows, — all save one, 

 Honor and reverence, and the good repute 

 That follows faithful service as its fruit, 

 Be unto him, whom living we salute." 



Professor Packard was born at Brunswick, Maine, February 19, 

 1839, and died at his home in Providence, February 11, 1905, after 

 an illness of about six weeks. He entered Bowdoin College at the 

 age of eighteen. In his senior year he commenced the serious pursuit 

 of investigations in natural history and continued it with unremitting 

 zeal until the very week of his death, when he insisted upon correct- 

 ing the proof of his last memoir, published by the National Academy, 

 of which he had long been a distinguished member. While an under- 

 graduate student he enjoyed the friendship and the inspiring in- 

 struction of Dr. Paul A. Chadbourne, who was afterwards president 

 of Williams College. It was through him that Packard joined the 



