AUGUSTUS LOWELL. 637 



His algebraic propensities won him local reputation as a mathematician, 

 and a manuscript volume upon the same, still in the family's possession, 

 is both curious and interesting reading. As a botanist he was known not 

 only at home but abroad, and was on terms of correspondence, not to say 

 criticism, with botanists of his day. His botanical care was not confined 

 to the livins: ; in his studies he collected a fine herbarium which received 

 fully as much of his attention, and attracted attention from others. The 

 son inherited both paternal proclivities, but both rather as deep-seated 

 mental characteristics than as current mental traits. Mathematics he 

 neither cared for, nor was proficient in, but he derived from his father 

 that logical exactness of mind which is their basis. The botany bore 

 greater fruit. His tastes for plants, including both trees and flowers, 

 proved a very deep-seated passion. Doubtless fostered in part by his 

 father's familiarity with shrubs — though as a boy he showed no marked 

 symptoms of botanic zeal — the love of growing things later became his 

 most pronounced avocation. 



In 1846 Mr. Lowell entered Harvard College where he spent the four 

 years enjoined for a degree and was duly graduated in 1850. It was not 

 then more than it is now the fashion to study, and he took his parchment 

 void of invidious distinction. Indeed his recollections do not seem to 

 have been specially academic, as one of the most vivid of them had to do 

 with a certain midnight ride for illicit purposes to the Watertown arsenal. 

 His rank in his class, if I am right, was sixteenth, just below what was 

 at the time the <J>BK line. He was not therefore a member of that de- 

 servedly distinguished society of learning, but it is significant of his sub- 

 sequent standing in the community that on the fiftieth anniversary of his 

 graduation he was elected into it as an honorary member, an honor he 

 never lived to receive or even know of, as unknown to the election 

 committee he was on his deathbed at the time. 



In college he was neither dissipated nor lazy. His course was much 

 like that of all his fellows, and is distinguished from the commonplace 

 only by a comical dream with which his ancestors saw fit to favor him 

 later on the subject, I say his ancestors advisedly as will shortly appear, 

 and I repeat the dream partly because of its touch of humor, of which he 

 was always fond, and partly because of its psychologic import. The gusto 

 with which he related it at the time proves the censure implied to have 

 been undeserved, but the atavism betrayed by it makes it worth recording. 



It was the family tradition that at college its scions should be students, 

 a traditional devoir handed down from father to son, though I am not 

 aware that tlie fathers always followed it themselves as religiously as 



