EWAN: SAN FRANCISCO AS A MECCA FOR NINETEENTH CENTURY NATURALISTS 33 



The "internal dissensions" of wliieh LeConte speaks were compounded of petty 

 jealousies and institutional politics. Jepson contended tliat these dissensions 

 were "engineered" by Mrs. Mary K. Curran. Harford served as Director of the 

 Museum from 1876 to 1886, but he "resigned" in altercation. The able Professor 

 George Davidson was replaced as President by Dr. H. W. Harkness. It is clear 

 from Setchell's biography of Mary Katharine Layne Curran Brandegee that he 

 admired her generous qualities and judged her actions disinterested. Professor 

 Jepson, on the contrary, looked upon her activities as scheming and vindictive. 

 In the professional sense Mrs. Brandegee showed penetrating insight in 

 botanical judgment, as abundantly demonstrated in reviews she prepared for the 

 journal Zoe. Though she recorded only the briefest data on her collection labels 

 — as if she intended to stymie another collector revisiting her station! — she 

 made excellent series of specimens illustrating the ecologic variations to be found 

 within a species. She joined the Academy about 1880, after taking her M.D. 

 degree two years before at the University of California, and began studying 

 botany under Dr. Behr. As Mary K. Curran, a widow, without heavy financial 

 obligations, she was able to devote her time and resources to the Academy's 

 Department of Botany fully, and she was made Curator of the Herbarium in 

 1883. There is no doubt but that she did important spade work for the herbar- 

 ium, which she described as "in a shocking condition" when she assumed the 

 curatorship. She also became acting Editor of the Academy's Bulletin. Katharine 

 Layne 's second marriage was felicitous for botany, as for the couple. Marcus 

 Jones remarked to me on one occasion, "Brandegee should have been born a 

 woman and Mrs. Brandegee should have been a man. So their marriage could 

 hardly help being a success!" 



Townshend Stith Brandegee came into the Academy's orbit soon after his first 

 visit to California in 1886-1887. It was the winter he came to collect tree trunks 

 for the Jesup collection of woods at the American Museum of Natural History, 

 A student of Daniel Cady Eaton in botany at Yale, where he graduated in engi- 

 neering, Brandegee went as a young man to Colorado to carry on surveying. He 

 took the opportunity to botanize widely over southern Colorado, as his surveying 

 duties took him to remote districts, and what is more important he had the 

 acumen to recognize the value of his discoveries and to communicate them to 

 Eastern botanists who were in the best position to assist him, Brandegee's self- 

 effacing reticence won him warm friendship from Asa Gray, C. S. Sargent, and 

 others, though his increasing deafness isolated him more and more after he came 

 to live in California. From 1884 to 1890 Mr, Brandegee visited several of the 

 Santa Barbara Islands, one of the most ambitious trips being that to Santa Cruz 

 and Santa Eosa islands in 1888, In 1889 the Academy sent its Curator of Birds, 

 Walter Pierce Bryant, and an assistant, Charles Haines, to Magdalena Bay, and 

 Brandegee joined the party at his own expense, collecting a large series of plants 

 in Lower California that season. It was following this first trip to Lower Cali- 

 fornia that the Brandegees were married, on May 29 in San Diego, after which 

 they set out on foot overland to San Francisco on a botanical honeymoon! For 

 five years thereafter the Brandegees made their headquarters at the Academy, 

 until 1894 when they moved to San Diego. A modest and unassuming man, 

 Brandegee expressed himself crisply on occasion. On one of the several trips to 

 San Jose del Cabo, when he attended the church there more out of deference to 



