EWAN: SAN FRANCISCO AS A MECCA FOR NINETEENTH CENTURY NATURALISTS 23 



to teach botany to students from the existing texts prepared by Professor Asa 

 Gray and ventured to discuss the matter with him. Wood suggested that Gray 

 prepare a text better suited to the secondary schools, but the titular head of 

 botany in this country denied the need was a valid one. Professor Wood ap- 

 proached Gray a second time but was again refused, whereujjon he set out to 

 prepare a "Class book of Botany" of his own. The first edition of Wood's Clnss- 

 hook appeared in 1845 in an edition of 1,500 copies and met with some consider- 

 able success. Those faithful to Gray disjiaragod Wood's intrusion on Gray's 

 established precincts, bolstering their opposition chiefly with the premise that 

 Professor Wood was ill-trained and had an inadequate background to undertake 

 the text. But the Class-hook was accepted more and more widely among the 

 academies and Wood kept pace with the trend by widening the scope of the 

 text with each new printing until in 1855— only ten years after its first publica- 

 tion — forty-one such "editions" had been issued! With ambition reminiscent of 

 that other challenging professor, Amos Eaton, Alphonso Wood determined to 

 extend his book to include the growing frontiers of America. So he made field 

 trips to Ohio and into the southern states, and in 1865-1866 to the Pacific Coast. 

 It is unfortunate that the details of his Western journey have not survived; 

 suffice to say that he traveled from San Diego to Oregon. Plagued with poor 

 health, limited funds, and the general insecurity attendant on the Civil War, he 

 found it difficult to make headway in his chosen field, but he devoted his last 

 years to botany from the year of his settling at West Farms, New York. The 

 student of California history would like to know more of the association of 

 Alphonso Wood with the person he commemorated in the naming of the endemic 

 mariposa of San Diego County, Calochortus Weedii. In the tradition of William 

 Young, w^lio contested the field with John and William Bartram in the early 

 years of the nation, and John Linnaeus Shecut, who nettled Stephan Elliott in 

 the description of the botany of the Carolinas, Alphonso Wood stood against 

 Asa Gray, not so much as a serious challenge to the supremacy of the leaders 

 but to remind us of the impossil^ility of establishing a monopoly in knowledge. 

 John Gill Lemmon was an ardent Abolitionist and, as in all the events of his 

 lifetime, turned a loyalty into action and enlisted in the Union Army. But he 

 was taken prisoner iand placed in the largest and best, if infamously known, of the 

 Confederate military prisons, at Andersonville, Georgia. It was a log stockade 

 of sixteen and a half acres holding within its pickets 31,678 prisoners in the 

 summer of 1864. Corn meal and beans, with a little meat, was the diet; respira- 

 tory diseases, diarrhoea, and scurvy were rami)ant in the ranks. John Lemmon "s 

 health was broken but he escaped interment with the 12,912 men left in the 

 National Cemetery there. He went to California as soon as possible, first to Sierra 

 Valley in 1866, and from eight years of tramping the meadows and slopes in pine- 

 scented air regained his health. ]\Ieanwhile, he discovered a world of plant life 

 about him and early in his Sierran residence sent some of his specimens to Asa 

 Gray for their names. With Gray's encouraging letters he continued the search, 

 and paused now and then to write homespun letters to the local newspapers on 

 plant lore. It was a high point when in 1876 he met Asa Gray personally. By 

 1880 Lemmon was devotedly wedded to botany and so it was with a kind of 

 bigamy prevalent among naturalists that he married Sara Allen Plummer of 

 Santa Barbara. They moved to Oakland and set up a botanical establishment at 



