540 EDWARD TUCKERMAN. 



In the year 1844 or 1845 he returned to Cambridge, and in the 

 autumn of 1846, in his twenty-ninth year, he became again an under- 

 graduate. Applying for admission to the incoming Senior Class, he 

 remarked to President Quincy that his father had broken the family 

 tradition by sending him to another college, and that he proposed to 

 correct the mistake. To the suggestion, that, being already an alum- 

 nus of the Law School as well as of Union, the University would 

 willingly concede to him the earlier degrees he sought, he replied 

 that he proposed to receive them in the ordinary way. He accord- 

 ingly 25assed the regular examinations, took the whole routine of the 

 studies of his class, and so was graduated with distinction in the class 

 of 1847, — a unique but characteristic illustration of a loyal spirit, 

 becoming '' Small by degrees and beautifully less," 



His passion for university study was not yet quite satiated. For, 

 two or three years later, he entered the Harvard Divinity School, 

 passed through its course of study and of prescribed exercises, — among 

 them the delivery of a sermon in one of the Cambridge churches, — 

 and so, in the year 1852, he became for the third time an alumnus of 

 Harvard. 



In May, 1854, he married in Boston Sarah Eliza Sigourney Cush- 

 ing, who survives him, without offspring. Removing that year to 

 Amherst, he built, with excellent taste, upon a beautiful site, the house 

 which has ever since been their abode. Although mainly devoted to 

 botanical investigations, his first official connection with Amherst Col- 

 lege was that of Lecturer in History, then that of Professor of Oriental 

 History, down to the year 1858, when he was collated to the chair of 

 Botany, which he held to the end of his life, although of late years 

 relieved from the duty of class instruction. The College did itself the 

 honor to confer upon its Professor the degree of LL. D. 



We cannot say when or how Professor Tuckerman became a bota- 

 nist. But at an early period he was intimate with Dr. Harris, then 

 University Librarian, and with the ardent William Oakes of Ipswich, 

 upon whom, through Dr. Osgood of Danvers, descended the mantle of 

 Manasseh Cutler, of Essex County, the earliest New England botanist. 



He must have been attracted to the Lichens almost from the begin- 

 ning. For his first publications were upon Lichens of New England, 

 largely those of his own collecting in the White and Green Moun- 

 tains, in two papers, one communicated to the Boston Natural History 

 Society in 1838 or 1839, the other in 1840. These were soon fol- 

 lowed by papers on phfenogamous botany, viz. one " On Oakesia, a 

 new Genus of the Order Empetrece,^* a contribution made while he 



