172 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



this signal example of a character modest, tranquil, dignified and 

 independent, and of a life simple, contented and honored." 



The father of Jeffries Wyman was Dr. Rufus Wyman, born in 

 Woburn, Mass., and graduated at Harvard in 1799; he studied 

 medicine under Dr. John Jeffries of Boston, and during the 

 latter part of his life was physician to the McLean Asylum for the 

 Insane; in this, the earliest institution of the kind in New England, 

 Dr. Wyman had the wisdom, the courage and the power to intro- 

 duce radical improvements in the care and treatment of mental 

 defectives. His wife was Ann, daughter of James Morrill, a 

 Boston merchant; this family name was continued in the baptis- 

 mal name of the second son, Dr. Morrill Wyman, of Cambridge, 

 who was held in the highest honor and affection until his death, 

 January 3oth, 1903. l 



1 For the family history, for the earlier life of Professor Wyman, for various 

 information, and for a revision of the completed manuscript I am indebted to 

 Professor Wyman's daughters, Miss Susan and Miss Mary Morrill Wyman; 

 to the only son, who inherited his father's name and has transmitted it to his 

 son; and to Dr. Henry P. Walcott, a connection of Professor Wyman by mar- 

 riage. Aid has been received also from Mr. Glover Morrill Allen, a relative of 

 Professor Wyman; from President Charles W. Eliot; from Professors Thomas 

 D wight and James C. White of the Harvard Medical School; from Dr. 

 Francis H. Brown and other pupils of Professor Wyman; and from Mr. Allen 

 Danforth, Comptroller of Harvard University. A friend and former teacher 

 discovered in the Boston papers of the period announcements and notices of 

 Wyman's Lowell Institute lectures and abstracts of some communications to 

 the Natural History Society, presumably sent by its secretary. There have 

 been consulted the memoirs or articles by Asa Gray (Address at the Memorial 

 Meeting of the Boston Society of Natural History, October yth, 1874, re- 

 printed from the Proceedings, vol. 17, pp. 96-124; also his Remarks, as Cura- 

 tor, pro tempore, of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Eth- 

 nology, in the Eighth Annual Report, presented April 8th, 1875 (Reports, 

 vol. i, pp. 7-11, with portrait); by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston Daily 

 Advertiser, September i2th, 1874, and, at greater length, under the title, 

 "A Memorial Outline," the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1874, pp. 611- 

 623); by S. Weir Mitchell (under the title, "The Scientific Life," Lippincott's 

 Magazine, March, 1875, pp. 352-356); by Alpheus S. Packard (reprinted 

 from Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 2, 

 1886, pp. 77-126); it was read April iSth, 1878, and contains a Bibliography 



