492 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
he proposed to receive them in the ordinary way. He accord- 
ingly passed the regular examinations, took the whole routine 
of the studies of his class, and so was graduated with distine- 
tion in the class of 1847, —a unique but characteristic illus- 
tration of a loyal spirit, becoming “small by degrees and 
beautifully less.” 
His passion for university study was not yet quite satiated. 
For, two or three years later, he entered the Harvard Divin- 
ity School, passed through its course of study and prescribed 
exercises, — among them the delivery of a sermon in one of 
the Cambridge churches, — and so, in the year 1852, he be- 
came for the third time an alumnus of Harvard. 
In May, 1854, he married in Boston Sarah Eliza Sigourney 
Cushing, who survives him, without offspring. Removing 
that year to Amherst, he built with excellent taste, upon a 
beautiful site, the house which has ever since been their 
abode. Although mainly devoted to botanical investigations, 
his first official connection with Amherst College was that of 
lecturer in history, then that of professor of oriental history, 
down to the year 1858, when he was collated to the chair 
of botany, which he held to the end of his life, although of 
late years relieved from the duty of class instruction. The 
college did itself the honor to confer upon its professor the 
degree of LL. D. 
We cannot say when or how Professor Tuckerman became 
a botanist. But at an early period he was intimate with Dr. 
Harris, then University librarian, and with the ardent Wil- 
liam Oakes of Ipswich, upon whom, through Dr. Osgood of 
Danvers, descended the mantle of Manasseh Cutler, of Essex 
County, the earliest New England botanist. 
He must have been attracted to the Lichens almost from 
the beginning ; for his first publications were upon Lichens 
of New England, largely those of his own collecting in the 
White and Green Mountains, in two papers, one communi- 
cated to the Boston Natural History Society, in 1838 or 18389, 
the other in 1840. These were soon followed by papers on 
Phenogamous botany, namely: one “On Oakesia a new 
Genus of the Order Empetrex,” a contribution made while 
