408 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
necessarily left out regions of the highest interest to the an- 
thropological investigator, those occupied in early times by the 
race to which we belong, and by the peoples with which the 
Aryan race has been most in contact. Desirous to extend his 
personal observations as far as possible, Dr. Pickering, a year 
after the return of the expedition, and at his own charges, 
crossed the Atlantic, visited Egypt, Arabia, the eastern part 
of Africa, and western and northern India. Then, in 1848, 
he published his volume on “The Races of Man, and their 
Geographical Distribution,” being the ninth volume of the 
“‘ Reports of the Wilkes’ Exploring Expedition.” Some time 
afterward, he prepared, for the fifteenth volume of this series, 
an extensive work on the “ Geographical Distribution of Ani- 
mals and Plants.” But, in the course of the printing, the ap- 
propriations by Congress intermitted or ceased, and the pub- 
lication of the results of the celebrated expedition was sus- 
pended. Publication it could hardly be called: for Congress 
printed only one hundred copies, in a sumptuous form, for 
presentation to states and foreign courts; and then the sev- 
eral authors were allowed to use the types and copperplates 
for printing as many copies as they required, and could pay 
for. Under this privilege, Dr. Pickering brought out in 1854 
a small edition of the first part of his essay,— perhaps the 
most important part,—and in 1876 a more bulky portion, 
“On Plants and Animals in their Wild State,” which is 
largely a transcript of the note-book memoranda as jotted 
down at the time of observation or collection. | 
These are all his publications, excepting some short com- 
munications to scientific journals and the proceedings of 
learned societies to which he belonged. But he is known to 
have been long and laboriously engaged upon a work for 
which, under his exhaustive treatment, a lifetime seems hardly 
sufficient ; a digest, in fact, of all that is known of all the 
animals and plants with which civilized man has had to do 
from the earliest period traceable by records. When Dr. 
Pickering died, he was carrying this work through the press 
at his own individual expense, had already in type five or six 
hundred quarto pages, and it is understood that the remainder, 
