340 WILLIAM HENRY HARVEY. 



botany in the college, which was pretty well endowed, fell vacant about this 

 time, and the college authorities, wishing to elect Harvey to the chair and so to 

 combine the two offices, conferred upon him the necessary degree of M. D. But 

 it was contended that an honorary degree did not meet the requirements, and so 

 Dr. Allman, the present distinguished professor of natural histoiy at Edinburg, 

 carried the election. 



Except for the slenderness of his salary, Dr. Harvey was now well placed for 

 scientific work, the object to which he wished to devote his life, and he entered 

 upon and pursued his distinguished career henceforth with an entire and well- 

 directed energy that never flagged until he was prostrated by mortal disease. 



He had already published, at the Cape in 1838, his Genera of South African 

 Plants, hastily prepared, solely for local use, but no unworthy beginning of his 

 work in PhaBnogamous Botany ; and in his favorite department of the science he 

 had brought out in 1841 his Manual of British Alga;, which here-edited in 1S49. 

 He now commenced the first of tho series of his greater works, illustrated by his 

 facile pencil — for he drew admirably. The first (monthly) part of his excellent 

 and beautiful Phycologia Britannica, a History of British Seaicceds, containing 

 colored figures of all the species inhabiting tho shores of the British islands, 

 appeared in January, 184G, and the undertaking was completed in 1851, in three 

 (or four) volumes, with 3G0 plates, all drawn on stone by his own hand. A simi- 

 lar but less extended work, the Nereis Australis, or Algce of the Southern Ocean, 

 which was begun in 1S47, was carried only to 50 plates of selected and beauti- 

 ful species. 



In 1 848, Dr. Harvey succeeded Dr. Litton as professor of botany in the Boyal 

 Dublin Society, to which belonged the botanic garden of Glasnevin ; this required 

 him to deliver short courses of lectures annually in Dublin or in some other Irish 

 town, and provided a welcome addition to his income. 



In 1848, at the request of his friend Van Voorst, the publisher, he wrote his 

 charming little volume, The Sea-Side Booh, the unsurpassed model of that class 

 of popular scientific books; it was published in 1849, and has passed through 

 .several editions. In July of that year, having arranged a visit to this country, 

 and having been invited to deliver a course of lectures before the Lowell Insti- 

 tute, he took steamer for Halifax and Boston, passed the summer aud autumn in 

 exploring the shores of the northern States, and in the society of his friends and 

 relatives; for the late Mr. Jacob Harvey, still well and pleasantly remembered 

 in New York, who married the daughter of Dr. Hosack, was his elder brother. 

 In the autumn he gave an admirable course of lectures upon Cryptogamic botany 

 before the Lowell Institute in Boston, and afterwards a shorter course at the 

 Smithsonian Institution at Washington. He then travelled in tho southern 

 Atlantic States, continuing the exploration of our Algce down to Florida and tho 

 Keys; and in May, 1850, he returned to Ireland.* Under the wise and liberal 

 arrangements made by Professor Henry in behalf of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 and with his own large collections augmented by the contributions which every 

 student or lover of Algce was glad to place in such worthy hands, Professor 

 Harvey now prepared his Nereis Boreali-Americana, or Contributions to a His- 

 tory of the Marine Algce of North America. The work is a systematic account 

 of all the known marine Algce of North America, but with figures only of tho 

 leading species. It was issued in three parts; the first part, the Melanospermece, 

 in 1852, in the third volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge; 

 the second, the Bhodospermece, in the fifth volume ; and the third, or Chloro- 

 sjjermea, in the tenth volume of the series published in 185S ; and the three parts, 

 collected for separate issue, compose a thick imperial quarto volume, of 550 pages 

 of letter-press and fifty plates. The work remains the principal if not the only 



*A notice of Dr. Harvey in the Athenaeum states, quite erroneously, that " he also at this 

 time made a tour around the shores of the Pacific, visiting Oregon ind California." 



