THOMAS POTTS JAMES.! 
THomas Ports JAMES died at his residence in Cam- 
bridge, February 22, 1882, in the seventy-ninth year of his 
age. He had been a Fellow of the Academy for only four 
years, most of his life having been spent in Philadelphia, in 
the neighborhood of which city he was born on the 1st of 
September, 1803. His paternal and maternal ancestors were 
notable persons among the earlier settlers of Pennsylvania. 
For forty years he was engaged in business in Philadelphia 
as a wholesale druggist, on the relinquishment of which he 
removed to Cambridge, bringing his wife and their four chil- 
dren to her paternal home. From his youth he was more or 
less devoted to botany ; but of late years, having more leisure 
for the indulgence of his taste, and wishing to be more than 
an amateur, he devoted himself exclusively and most sedu- 
lously to bryology, in which he became a proficient. After 
the death of Mr. Sullivant in 1878, Mr. James and our asso- 
ciate, Lesquereux, were looked to as the principal authorities 
upon Mosses in this country; and the duty appropriately de- 
volved upon them of preparing the systematic work upon 
North American Bryology which Mr. Sullivant had planned. 
Owing to the preoccupation of Mr. Lesquereux in vegetable 
paleontology, the laboring oar fell to Mr. James. He had 
already published some papers upon the subject in the “ Trans- 
actions of the American Philosophical Society,” of which he 
had long been an active member, and he had contributed to 
Mr. Watson’s “ Botany of Clarence King’s Exploration on the 
Fortieth Parallel” a notable article on the Mosses of that 
survey. Our own Academy has also published some of the 
results of the joint study of these two veteran bryologists. 
The characters of Mosses in these days are mostly drawn 
1 Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Science, xvii. 405. 
(1882.) 
