768 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS. 



the French Academy, and the Imperial Academy of St. Petersbnrg, of 

 which he was one of the very few Americans who have been elected 

 corresponding^ members, this Academy was the society in which he 

 felt the greatest interest and was most at home. 



There are few volumes of our Proceedings which do not contain im- 

 portant communications from his pen. One of the earliest of his works, 

 the " Ohloris Boreali- Americana," was printed in the third volume of the 

 Academy's Memoirs, in 1846 ; and to subsequent volumes he contributed 

 "Plantffi Fendleriana3 Novi-Mexicaute," presented in November, 1848; 

 "Plantte Novai Thurberiau.T," and "Note on the Affinities of the Genus 

 Vavcva, Benth., also of Rhytidandra, Gray," August and October, 1854; 

 and a group of four papers, entitled " Botanical Memoirs," in 1859, in- 

 cluding one '' On the Botany of Japan, and its Relations to that of 

 Nortli America " — a remarkable essay on the geographical distribution 

 of plants, which stamped the author as worthy to rank with the great 

 botanists of the world. We need not enumerate his many papers 

 which have appeared in the Proceedings of the Academy, for they alone 

 w^ould fill several volumes. It was his custom to embody the results 

 of his preliminary studies on the North American flora in the form of 

 notes on critical species, descriptions of novelties, and monographs of 

 genera, and sometimes orders, of which by far the greater part first 

 appeared in our Proceedings, usually under the heading of "Botanical 

 Contributions," a long and very valuable series, dating from the paper 

 "On some New Compositce from Texas," presented December 1, 1840, 

 and ending with the posthumous "Notes upon some Polypetalous 

 Genera and Orders," presented April 19, 1888. Nor should we forget 

 the many biographical notices in which he commemorated the lives and 

 works of others with an appreciating discrimination, written in a man- 

 ner peculiarly his own. 



The botanical department of Harvard University was practically 

 created by Asa Gray. In 1805 a small botanic garden was established 

 at Cambridge, under the auspices and by the aid of the Massachusetts 

 Society for i*romoting Agriculture, and William Dandridge Peck was 

 appointed director and professor of botany. In 1818 he printed a " Cat 

 alogue of American and Foreign Plants cultivated in the Botanic Gar- 

 den, Cambridge," in which one thousand three hundred and nine species 

 were enumerated ; but the list included some common cryptogams found 

 everywhere, and a large number of pha>nogamic shrubs and weeds, 

 common natives of the region, hardly to be counted as legitimate mem- 

 bers of a botanic garden. Professor Peck died in 1822, when, owing 

 to the low state of the funds, a professor was not appointed, but Thomas 

 Nuttall, the well-known botanist and ornithologist, was appointed 

 curator of the garden, and later, lecturer on botany. This amiable, 

 but very reticent naturalist— who apparently did not find his residence 

 in Cambridge very congenial (for he describes himself as vegetating 

 like his plants), —resigned his position in 1833, and returned to Phila- 



