SAMUEL HUBBARD SCUDDER. 



1837-1911. 



By ALFRED GOLDSBOEOUGH MAYOR. 



On both sides of his house Samuel Hubbard Scudder was of Puritan origin, the first Amer- 

 ican ancestor on his father's side being John Scudder, who coming from London in 1635, settled 

 in CharlestOwn, and from there went to Barnstable on Cape Cod. Here certain of his descend- 

 ants still live, and have for generations followed the sea. Charles Scudder, the father of the 

 subject of this biography, escaped the family calling through the accident of having come to 

 Boston too late to join the vessel in which he was to serve as a cabin boy. He therefore re- 

 mained in the city and entered upon a commercial career, becoming a well-known hardware and 

 commission merchant. After living thus for fully 30 years he married for his third wife Sarah 

 Lathrop Coit, daughter of a distinguished Puritan lineage, who traced her descent through 

 the Manwarings and Saltonstalls to Gov. Winthrop of colonial fame. 



Both Charles Scudder and his wife were firm supporters of the orthodox religion of their 

 ancestry; he being a deacon in Union Church, of the Congregational faith, in Boston; and in 

 this faith were their seven children reared, with all that strictness consistent to the salvation 

 of their souls. It was a stern faith that of his ancestors, who had braved the storms of the North 

 Atlantic to win a secure anchorage for their creed along the bleak shores of Massachusetts Bay, 

 yet there was nothing of the sour sescetic in Charles Scudder, for the health-giving enjoyments 

 of this world were as essential according to his views as were the exacting duties of religion, 

 and a man of the world he was in the sense that he won and kept the cordial esteem of his 

 fellow townsmen throughout a long and useful life in the business affairs of Boston. 



Into this morally healthful atmosphere Samuel Hubbard Scudder was born on April 13, 

 1837. Among brick walls and stone pavements the great student of nature was first to see 

 the light, but fortunately the family soon moved to "Roseland," a pleasant country home in 

 Iioxbury, 3 miles from the town of Boston. Here among the woods and fields of a 30-acre 

 estate young Scudder spent his early years, his only known adventure being a successful attempt 

 to jump over a cow, which resulted, however, in a broken arm on his part, but no recorded 

 injury to the cow. He tells us, however, that wild nature made no appeal to his imagination in 

 those days, yet somehow we suspect it registered its appeal unheeded at the time, but to be 

 sprung into his conscious recognition later. Possibly it was the compelling force of indifference 

 or ill-defined opposition that helped to move him to his life work, for when a child of 10 he, 

 marveling at the beauty of a forest stick covered with brightly-colored fungi, brought it as a 

 treasure to his father, who promptly threw it in the fire, calling it a " dirty stick." How many 

 a career is in early life determined in response to the spur of misunderstanding? Yet for 

 some years, bright boy though he was, nature made no conscious appeal to him, perhaps 

 because at this time he was the admiring companion of his elder brother David, in whose 

 footsteps as a potential naturalist he was content to walk unheedingly. 



Had he not chosen the self-sacrificing career of a missionary in India, one thinks David 

 might also have become a naturalist of distinction so replete is his journal with the mystery of 

 the tropical jungle and interest in the forgotten races of the prehistoric past of India, 1 but he 

 was destined to die in his youthful manhood in attempting to swim a flooded river in the 

 mountains of southern India. 



' See Life and letters of David Coit Scudder, missionary in Southern India, by Horace E. Scudder, 1864, Hurd & Houghton, Boston. 



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