THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 41 



specimen. On a south bank it may persist and spread ; on a 

 northern slope it may dwindle and die. Its aggressiveness is 

 not a matter entirely of constitution and heredity but rather 

 of soil and situation and plant neighbors. 



CENTENARY OF A BOTANIST. 



x\ttention has lately been directed to the unusually large 

 number of eminent men whose centenaries have been celebrated 

 in 1909. To the list might be added Dr. A. W. Chapman, the 

 botanist. Although he lived most of his life in a comparatively 

 inaccessible place, and was personally known to but few peo- 

 ple, he was for a long time the leading botanist in the South, 

 as his contemporary. Dr. Asa Gray, was in the North. At 

 least three biographical sketches of him have been published, 

 but a brief outline of his life may be of interest to some of 

 your readers. 



Of English ancestry, he was born in Southhampton, 

 Mass., Sept. 28, 1809. In his twenty-first year he graduated 

 from Amherst College, where he had already displayed a de- 

 cided talent for botany. The following year he moved to 

 Georgia, where he spent four years, mostly teaching. He be- 

 gan the study of medicine in the office of a physician in Geor- 

 gia, and received the decree of M. D. at Louisville, Ky., 

 in 1836. 



From Georgia Dr. Chapman went to Florida and practiced 

 medicine, first at Quincy, then at Marianna, and finally at 

 Apalachicola, where he spent the last fifty-two years of his 

 life. Within a radius of 100 miles of Apalachicola, there are 

 many species of plants which do not grow anywhere else in 

 the world, and the meeting with these on his professional 

 trips and holidays was doubtless a great stimulus to Dr. 

 Chapman's botanical work. Very few botanists had visited 



