BOSTON SOCIETY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 123 



might choose to invite, and that the temporary effect of this at least had been beneficial, 

 leading to a better attendance on the part of the members themselves. As stated subse- 

 quently, there is no record of the permission having been withdrawn, but as ladies ceased 

 to attend, it is fair to presume they did so from lack of interest in the proceedings. Twenty 

 years had elapsed, and again an effort was made to have their attendance. The Council at 

 a meeting in June of this year voted : " That members have permission to invite ladies to 

 attend the second meeting of each month." 



Previous to the summer recess the Lecture Committee of the Council reported in favor 

 of having three courses of lectures during the next succeeding winter, one course of four 

 by Dr. Jeffries on the anatomy of the eye, one by Mr. W. H. Niles, of ten or twelve on the 

 Geological History of North America, and one by Mr. Wm. T. Brigham on some botanical 

 subject. The report was accepted and adopted. 



In October Dr. Burt G. Wilder resigned his position as Curator of Herpetology, being 

 about to remove from the State. 



November 18th, Dr. Chas. F. Folsom was elected Curator of Comparative Anatomy, and 

 J. A. Allen Curator of Herpetology. 



In November the death of Mi-. Octavius Pickering, long a member of the Society and one 

 of the founders of the Linnaean, was announced with appropriate remarks by the President. 



At the next meeting, the Society was called upon to deplore the loss of another member 

 by the death of Mr. Horace Mann, the youngest ofl&cer in its service, Curator of Botany. 

 The remarks upon the occasion by Mr. Wm. T. Brigham, his intimate friend, were very 

 appropriate and the following particulars are abstracted from them. 



In his earliest youth Mr. Mann imbibed a love of nature from the teachings of his father, 

 and in opposition to the advice of many of his friends who wished him to have a collegiate 

 education, entered the school of Prof Agassiz as a student of zoology and geology. He 

 was at the same time deeply interested in botany, and it was from this taste that his friend- 

 ship with the speaker commenced. In company they visited the Hawaiian Islands and 

 studied the peculiar flora of that group. Soon after his return -to Cambridge, Mr. Mann 

 was appointed assistant to Dr. Gray, and subsequently instructor in botany in Harvard 

 College. Besides the work of arranging the Thayer Herbarium, and of aiding Dr. Gray 

 both in preparing material for his classes, and in revising proof for his two botanical man- 

 uals, he worked steadily in spare hours, often late into the night, upon his Hawaiian col- 

 lections, many thousand specimens of which were determined, labelled and distributed. 

 His enumeration of Hawaiian plants, which has given him a good botanical reputation, 

 was published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which body he was 

 elected a fellow on the very evening of his death. As the result of these Hawaiian 

 explorations, five new genera and sixty-seven new species were added to the flora. 



Early in October, Mr. Mann yielded to the solicitations of his friends, and resigned his 

 college classes ; but the worst forms of pulmonary complaint had gone too for to be 

 checked ; and although at times his recovery was hoped for, he continued to fail rapidly, 

 and passed away on the evening of November 11th. 



1869. Mr. Edward S. Morse, then residing in Salem, was engaged to work on the 

 shells of the Pratt collection, for three alternate days of each week through the year, the 

 other three days being devoted to work on the collections of the Peabody Academy. 



