THOMAS POTTS JAMES. 405 



tures, he took but little part in tlie selection or preparation of it. His 

 literary activity during this period was mostly confined to a revision 

 of his poenas for a new edition, and to a partial co-operation in the 

 publication of a few essays written long before. The entire sanity of 

 his intellect and the beautiful serenity of his disposition were untouched, 

 but his memory, particularly of woi'ds, faded so as to render conversa- 

 tion a burden to him. At the funeral of Mr. Longfellow, a few weeks 

 before his own death, it was remarked that he forgot the names of 

 familiar acquaintances. A cold, taken a short time afterwards, passed 

 into pneumonia, of which he died April 27, 1882, a few weeks short 

 of his 79th birthday. 



Mr. Emerson delivered the annual oration before the <f>. B. K. 

 Society in 1837 and in 18G7. He received the degree of LL.D. from 

 Harvard College in 1867, and was chosen Overseer in the same year. 

 In 1878 he was chosen Foreign Associate in the Academy of Moral and 

 Political Sciences of the Institute of France, to fill the place left vacant 

 by the death of Mr. J. L. Motley. 



The following is a list of his principal published works : — Nature, 

 183G; $. B. K. Oration, 1837; Essays, first series, 1841 ; Address 

 on the Anniversary of Emancipation in the West Indies, 1844 ; Essays, 

 second series, 1844 ; Poems, 1847 ; Miscellanies, 1849 ; Representative 

 Men, 1850 ; Memoir of Margaret Fuller, 1852; English Traits, 1856; 

 Conduct of Life, 1860 ; May-day and other Poems, 1867 ; Society and 

 Solitude, 1870; Letters and Social Aims, 1875; Fortune of the 

 Republic, 1878. 



THOMAS POTTS JAMES. 



Thomas Potts James died, at his residence in Cambridge, 

 Feb. 22, 1882, in the seventy-ninth year of his age. He had 

 been a Fellow of the Academy for only four years, most of his life 

 having been spent in Philadelphia, in the neighborhood of which city 

 he was born on the 1st of September, 1803. His paternal and ma- 

 ternal ancestors were notable persons among the earlier settlers of 

 Pennsylvania, For forty years he was engaged in business in Phila- 

 delphia as a wholesale druggist, on the relinquishment of which he 

 removed to Cambridge, bringing his wife and their four children to 

 her paternal home. From his youth he was more or less devoted to 

 botany ; but of late years, having more leisure for the indulgence of 

 his taste, and wishing to be more than an amateur, he devoted himself 

 exclusively and most sedulously to bryology, in which he became a 



