22 ^ CENTURY OF PROGRESS IN THE NATURAL SCIENCES 



English-born Shakespearean tragedian, Henry Edwards, traveled with a 

 theatrical company from Australia to Peru and California in 1853, and wrote 

 of his impressions in a slender volume called A Mingled Yarn (1883). In 1865 

 Edwards came back to San Francisco and was associated wdth the old California 

 Theatre. During all these j^ears on the stage, traveling and as a San Franciscan, 

 he collected butterflies at every opportunity. His collection grew by his own 

 takes and through exchanges until it was one of the finest ever assembled in this 

 country, numbering some 250,000 specimens. In addition, Edwards found time 

 to collect beetles, plants, and shells for his friends in the Academy, of which he 

 was a faithful associate. There and at the Bohemian Club he found a congenial 

 friend in Dr. Belir. Edwards made plant collections at Sausalito, in March, 1877: 

 Summit, on the Central Pacific Railroad, July, 1877; Knights Valley and Skaggs 

 Springs, Sonoma County, in 1877, and in Santa Clara Valley — all of these are 

 represented in the liarbarium of the New York Botanical Garden. There's a hint 

 of the actor in his locality on one label "San Leander"! 



John Torrey, the senior associate of Asa Gray in midcentury botany, visited 

 California on two occasions. His trip of 1865, made via the Isthmian passage, 

 included a short stay in San Francisco, but he took the Revenue steamer Shuhrick 

 for Santa Barbara on business for the U. S. Treasury as inspector of banks. 

 Writing in his usual buoyant mood, he told Asa Gray that he was "high admiral 

 of the expedition." He made sure to save some time from the inspection of ledgers 

 and balances to devote to the plants growing around the towns visited : from 

 Borax Lake and vicinity to Donner Lake, Bear Mountain, and the Yosemite. 



One of the collectors well known to Torrey and Gray for his valued specimens 

 was Dr. Charles Lewis Anderson, who moved from Minneapolis in 1862 to Carson 

 City, Nevada, and four years later to Santa Cruz. At Santa Cruz his name became 

 synonymous with natural history since there for forty years Dr. Anderson 

 engaged, not in botanical, zoological, and geological investigations for himself, 

 but generously answered various questions for others. In botany he devoted him- 

 self especially to marine algae about the bay, to grasses in the hills and valleys 

 of the county, and the willow species along the stream courses. 



Edward Tuckerman was a genial, if meticulous, professor at Amherst, and 

 one of the students there in the 1850's was George Lincoln Goodale. Goodale took 

 the medical degree at both Harvard and Bowdoin, and then set up practice at 

 Portland, Maine. From all of this close application his health broke and the year 

 1865 found him in California trying to find a cure in tramping the hills and 

 collecting the plants about which Professor Tuckerman had talked back at 

 Amherst. The cure must have been complete, and more and more botany sup- 

 planted medicine until he settled as Curator of the Botanical Museum at Harvard 

 and for thirty years taught and studied the economic plant collections that came 

 to him. He is remembered as one of the first professors to use lantern slides to 

 illustrate his lectures. Goodale possessed a fine historical sense, too, and pre- 

 served mementoes of our botanical past for Harvard's "glory hole," as Thomas 

 Barbour would say. 



Less honored but perhaps more influential was the author of the botany best 

 seller that sold 800,000 copies, Professor Alphonso Wood. First a student of 

 theology, then a practicing civil engineer, a teacher of Latin and natural history 

 in the Kimball Union Academy near Hanover. Alphonso Wood found it difficult 



