26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



through nearly half a century. These related, some of them to Phy- 

 sics and Chemistry, more to Meteorology, to which he paid much at- 

 tention, but most of all to the one department of Botany, with which he 

 has inseparably connected his name. His only separate botanical work 

 was a Report on the Herbaceous Flowering Plants of Massachusetts, 

 made by him as one of the Commissioners on the Zoological and Bo- 

 tanical Survey of the State, recommended by Governor Everett, at the 

 suggestion of the Boston Society of Natural History, as the comple- 

 ment of the Geological Survey by the late Professor Hitchcock. 

 Although much less important than the Avell-known reports of his col- 

 leagues, Harris, Gould, Storer, and Emerson, it shows his predilection 

 for botanical pursuits. But, aware that other duties must mainly fill 

 his working hours, Professor Dewey wisely selected a special depart- 

 ment upon which he could concentrate the endeavoi's his leisure might 

 allow, and turn them to permanent account. He chose the large and 

 difficult genus Carex for special study, and in it became a leading au- 

 thority. His " Cartography " in Silliman's Journal began in the year 

 1824, and finished with a general index to the numerous articles 

 scattered through forty-three years, in January, 1867. There are very 

 few of our about two hundred North American species with which Dr. 

 Dewey's name is not in some way associated, and of many he was the 

 original describer. 



Professor Dewey must have been one of the latest survivors of 

 those whose taste for natural history was developed under the lectures 

 of Amos Eaton, when that remarkable man commenced his career as a 

 teacher in Western New England, and in Botany, having devoted him- 

 self perseveringly to a particular department, he became the most 

 distinguished of that school. As teacher, man of science, citizen, and 

 Christian minister, he was a specimen of the typical Western New- 

 Englander, — a peer among those who have not only made that dis- 

 trict what it is, but have also in great measure founded the institu- 

 tions and determined the character of the now lengthened line of 

 States westward from the Hudson to beyond the Mississippi. Highly 

 esteemed and honored throughout an unusually long and useful life, in 

 his serene old age he was very greatly revered. 



Dr. Samuel Luther Dana died at Lowell, Massachusetts, March 

 11, 1868, in the seventy-third year of his age, of the effects of a fall 

 on the ice some weeks before. 



Dr. Dana was a native of Amherst, New Hampshire, fitted for col- 



