Curtis: Lucien Marcus Underwood ' 5 



in that locality. A request was made for exchange of native or 

 foreign specimens. During this year at Cazenovia he was able to 

 complete his graduate work in geology, publishing his thesis in 

 1879 on "The Geological Formations Crossed by the Syracuse 

 and Chenango Valley Railroad," with a sketch of the hydrography 

 of Onondaga and Madison counties. 



The following year he was called to the professorship of natural 

 sciences in Hedding College, Abingdon, Illinois, where in addition 

 to the science work he had a class in English literature ; in a letter 

 to a friend he writes that he had a hard time keeping ahead of a 

 junior class, five hours a week, using Deschanel's Physics. His 

 labors closed at this institution in the spring with his taking charge 

 for four weeks of the president's class in Butler's Analogy ! It 

 was during this busy period that he conceived the idea and pre- 

 pared the manuscript for a manual of the ferns of North America. 

 In 1880 he became professor of geology and botany at the 

 Illinois Wesleyan University, at Bloomington, Illinois, where he 

 remained three years. This was a period of unusual activity, as 

 well as one of great diversity of interests. He experienced, so it 

 seemed to him then, the greatest ambition of his life — the publi- 

 cation of his manuscript on the ferns. This work appeared in 1 88 1 

 as a small octavo volume of 1 16 pages, containing a description of 

 H7 species, under the title of " Our Native Ferns and How to * 



udy Them." The edition was limited to 400 copies and was 

 sold out within the year. A second edition (" Our Native Ferns 

 and Their Allies ") was published the following year, the larger 

 portion of it being subsequently destroyed by fire, and the third 

 edition was entrusted in 1888 to Henry Holt and Company, who • 

 issued the sixth revised edition in 1900. 



It was during this period that he became interested in the 



epaticae and began the accumulation of the literature on the 



group. He also had access to Austin's Hepaticae Boreali-Ameri- 



canae Exiccatae at the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural His- 



or y, one mile distant from the university. He soon conceived 



e ldea of publishing a manual of the group on the plan of his 



ik on ferns and from the sources above mentioned a catalogue 



° the He paticae was compiled and published in 1884 in the Bul- 



etm of the Illinois State Laboratorv of Natural History under the 



