JOHN TORREY. 365 
came the third and the last; for Dr. Torrey’s associate was 
now also immersed in professorial duties and in the conse- 
quent preparation of the works and collections which were 
necessary to their prosecution. 
From that time to the present the scientific exploration of 
the vast interior of the continent has been actively carried on, 
and in consequence new plants have poured in year by year 
in such numbers as to overtask the powers of the few work- 
ing botanists of the country, nearly all of them weighted with 
professional engagements. The most they could do has been 
to put collections into order in special reports, revise here and 
there a family or a genus monographically, and incorporate 
new materials into older parts of the fabric, or rough-hew 
them for portions of the edifice yet to be constructed. In all 
this Dr. Torrey took a prominent part down almost to the last 
days of his life. Passing by various detached and scattered 
articles upon curious new genera and the like, but not forget- 
ting three admirable papers published in the “Smithsonian 
Contributions to Knowledge” (Plante Fremontiane, and 
those on Batis and Darlingtonia), there is a long series of 
important, and some of them very extensive, contributions to 
the reports of government explorations of the western coun- 
try, — from that of Long’s expedition, already referred to, in 
which he first developed his powers, through those of Nicollet, 
Fremont, and Emory, Sitgreaves, Stansbury, and Marcy, and 
those contained in the ampler volumes of the Surveys for Pa- 
cific Railroad routes, down to that of the Mexican Boundary, 
the botany of which forms a bulky quarto volume, of much 
interest. Even at the last, when he rallied transiently from 
the fatal attack, he took in hand the manuscript of an elabo- 
rate report on the plants collected along our Pacific coast in 
Admiral Wilkes’s celebrated expedition, which he had pre- 
pared fully a dozen years ago, and which (except as to the 
plates) remains still unpublished through no fault of his. 
There would have been more to add, perhaps of equal impor- 
tance, if Dr. Torrey had been as ready to complete and pub- 
lish, as he was to investigate, annotate, and sketch. Through 
undue diffidence and a constant desire for a greater perfec- 
