EDWARD TUCKERMAN. 541 



was abroad, in the summer of 1842, to Hooker's London Journal of 

 Botany. Unfortunately, the interesting plant which he thus dedicated 

 to his botanical associate, William Oakes, who well deserved such com- 

 memoration, proved to be a second species of Corema. In 1843, at 

 Schenectady, he privately printed and issued his " Enumeratio Me- 

 thodica Caricum quarundam," (pp. 21, 8vo,) in which he displayed 

 not only his critical knowledge of the large and difficult genus Carex^ 

 but also his genius as a systematizer ; for this essay was the first 

 considerable, and a really successful, attempt to combine the species of 

 this genus into natural groups. It is wholly in Latin, which he much 

 affected for scientific disquisition as well as for technical characters, 

 and used with facility and elegance. In the same year also appeared, 

 in the American Journal of Science, the first of his " Observations on 

 some interesting Plants of New England." This was followed in 1848 

 by a second, and in 1849 by a third paper in the same Journal ; these 

 containing, inter alia, his elaboration of our species of Potamogeton, 

 then for the first time critically studied. These papers — with one or 

 two in Hovey's Magazine and elsewhere, at about the same date — may 

 be said to have ended his work in phtenogamous botany, although his 

 interest in the subject never died out. For when he accepted the 

 chair of Botany at Amherst he began the preparation of " A Cata- 

 logue of Plants growhig without Cultivation within thirty Miles of 

 Amherst College," which he published in the year 1875, the late Mr. 

 Charles Frost of Brattleborough contributing the lower Cryptoganiia 

 other than the Lichens. In matter and form, as well as in typogra- 

 phy (in which Professor Tuckerman had exquisite taste), this cata- 

 logue is one of the very best. 



But it was to Lichenology that his strength, as indeed almost his 

 whole life, was most assiduously devoted. When, in his youth, the 

 active members of the newly organized Natural History Society of 

 Boston divided among themselves the work of making better known 

 the animals, plants, and minerals of Massachusetts, the study of the 

 Lichens either was assigned to him or he voluntered to undertake it. 

 From this came those earliest papers which have already been men- 

 tioned. Also his " Synopsis of the Lichens of New England, the other 

 Northern States, and British America," communicated to this Academy 

 ill the autumn of 1847, which is the most considerable botanical con- 

 tribution to the first volume of the Proceedings. The fourth, fifth, 

 sixth, and seventh volumes contain other of his lichenological papers, 

 of wholly original matter and critical cliaracter, — largely upon collec- 

 tions which had begun to come to him from the Rocky Mountain 



