JACOB BIGELOW. - 415 
botany for the region. What a popular and satisfactory work 
it was, especially to hundreds of amateur botanists, some still 
living may testify. 
The third and last edition, issued in 1840, was a reprint, 
with various additions and corrections, furnished mainly from 
those who had learned their botany from the preceding one. 
This is the last Flora or Manual of this and perhaps any 
other country, arranged upon the Linnzan artificial system. 
Much later in life the author contemplated a revision of the 
work, brought up to the time and illustrated by chromo- 
lithographic plates, such as we have lately seen turned to good 
account. But after some consideration the project was aban- 
doned. He did not propose himself to undertake the editorial 
work ; for he had long since passed from actual service into 
the emeritus or honorary rank of botanists; and his active 
professional life, already verging to its close, was diversified 
or relieved by other avocations. Indeed, some of these were 
taken up very early. He became Rumford professor of the 
applications at Cambridge in 1816, and delivered annual 
courses of lectures until 1827, when he published the sub- 
stance of them in a volume entitled “ Elements of Technol- 
ogy,” here coining this apt word. During all this time, and 
much longer, he was professor of Materia Medica in the medi- 
eal school of Harvard University, namely from 1815 to 1855; 
for many of these years one of the physicians of the Massa- 
chusetts General Hospital; through all of them, and until old 
age disabled him, a leading physician of Boston. From the 
year 1847 to 1863 he was president of the American Academy 
of Arts and Sciences, of which body he was a member for 
sixty-seven years ! 
We cannot here refer to Dr. Bigelow’s various professional 
and literary writings. They are not numerous, but are weighty. 
His treatise on “‘ Nature in Disease,” which contains the fa- 
mous discourse “ On Self-limited Disease,” is the most impor- 
tant of them; and an address “On the Limits of Education,” 
delivered in the year 1865 before the Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology, is notable. It has been said of the latter, that 
never before was the depreciation of classical study or general 
