26o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF ALPHEUS SPRING PACKARD. 



By Professor J. S. KINGSLEY. 



THE influence which Louis Agassiz had in the development 

 of American science is to be estimated not by his published 

 works, but by the enthusiasm he instilled into all who came un- 

 der his instruction. In the years from 1861 to 1864 there were 

 gathered at Cambridge as his pupils eight men, each of whom 

 has made a name for himself in science. These eight were Alex- 

 ander Agassiz, Alpheus Hyatt, Edward Sylvester Morse, Alpheus 

 Spring Packard, Frederick Ward Putnam, Samuel Hubbard Scud- 

 der, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, and Addison Emory Verrill. 



Alpheus Spking Packard, the subject of the present sketch, 

 is one of the four sons of the venerated Prof. Packard who for 

 over sixty years was connected with the faculty of Bowdoin Col- 

 lege. He was born at Brunswick, Me., February 19, 1839, and at 

 the age of eighteen entered the college where his father was a 

 professor. While a student he evinced a marked predilection 

 for natural history, a tendency which was fostered and encour- 

 aged by the late Dr. Paul A. Chadbourne, who at that time was 

 a professor in both Williams and Bowdoin Colleges. At Will- 

 iams there was a flourishing students' society, the Lyceum of 

 Natural History, which at this time had sent out several scien- 

 tific expeditions, and in the summer of 1860 they laid their plans 

 for another, the objective points of which were Labrador and 

 Greenland. When the expedition set sail from Thomaston, Me., 

 young Packard joined it and went as far as Labrador, where he 

 spent fifty days collecting near Caribou Island. The others went 

 to Greenland, and on their return took him and his collections 

 back to the States in time for him to begin the studies of his 

 senior year. These, however, were not without interruption, for 

 before graduation he led a party of classmates on a dredging and 

 collecting expedition to the Bay of Fundy, 



At commencement in 1861 Bowdoin gave him his bachelor's 

 degree, and then the field was opened to him to follow his scien- 

 tific bent. In the spring of that year the Legislature of Maine 

 had authorized a scientific survey of the State, and Mr. Packard 

 received the appointment of entomologist on the corps. In this 

 capacity he accompanied a party who went up the east branch 

 of the Penobscot and then down the Alleguash and St. John's 

 Rivers as far as Woodstock. With the materials gathered on 

 this expedition Mr. Packard wrote the first of that long series of 

 scientific articles which have emanated from his pen. It was an 

 essay on the army-worm, which at that time was doing consid- 

 erable damage to agricultural interests in Maine. This paper. 



