840 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hours afterward, lying in the bottom of the boat, dead from heart- 

 disease. 



The nature and variety of Dr. Lapham's scientific pursuits are illus- 

 trated by his biographer, Mr. S. S. Sherman, in an anecdote : " When 

 asked, by a gentleman well known in scientific circles, in what depart- 

 ment of science he was laboring, he replied, ' I am studying Wisconsin.' " 

 The variety and accuracy of his knowledge made him a kind of ency- 

 clopaedia a ready reference on almost every subject ; and Mr. Sher- 

 man fills several pages of his biography with a list of questions on 

 which he was consulted by farmers, citizens, miners, archaeologists, 

 amateurs, or scientific men like Professor Agassiz (to whom, apologiz- 

 ing at one time for not being able to send a better supply of certain 

 fishes he had asked for, he pleaded that he was " not an expert fisher- 

 man "), Asa Gray, and Alfonso Wood. Professor Wood placed him 

 "among the five or six most active and intelligent botanists in the 

 country." Professor Gray declared him the pioneer botanist of his 

 State, whose name would be inseparably connected with its flora, and 

 called a new genus of plants after him, Lcqihamia. He was one of 

 the founders of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Letters, and 

 Arts, an LL. D. (1860) of Amherst College, an honorary member of 

 the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Copenhagen, and a member of 

 most scientific associations of the United States. The list of his pub- 

 lications, some of the more important of which have already been 

 indicated in the course of this article, numbers about forty-five titles. 

 Ten of them are upon geological subjects, nine on subjects of botany 

 and natural history, seven climatological and meteorological, three on 

 the antiquities and the Indians of Wisconsin, three upon physical 

 phenomena (the effects of the destruction of the forests, the great 

 fires of 1871, and the great fresh-water lakes), and one is the article 

 " Wisconsin " in the " American Cyclopaedia." The others are topo- 

 graphical, or relate to miscellaneous subjects. The last was "The 

 Laws of Embryonic Development the same in Plants as in Animals," 

 which was published in the "American Naturalist" of May, 1875. 

 Besides these, he left a mass of valuable notes and manuscripts, show- 

 ing the fruits of industrious research. 



