LIFE OF JAMES DWIGHT DANA 



The names should also be given here of the chaplain, 

 Rev. Jared L. Elliott, and of those who were, for differ- 

 ent periods, members of the medical staff, viz. : Drs. 

 Edward Gilchrist, John L. Fox, J. S. Whittle, J. F. 

 Sickles, Silas Holmes, James C. Palmer, and C. T. Cuil- 

 lon. Dr. Holmes had been a classmate of Dana's in his 

 undergraduate course at Yale. Henry Eld, one of the 

 midshipmen who achieved distinction in hydrography, 

 was likewise from New Haven. Soon after the voyage 

 he became a lieutenant, and died in 1850. 



Some of Dana's scientific colleagues must now be in- 

 troduced to the reader. The oldest and by far the most 

 distinguished of them was Charles Pickering, M.D. 

 (1805-1878), a native of Pennsylvania, a grandson of the 

 statesman Timothy Pickering, and a member of the class 

 of 1823 in Harvard College, whose previous and subse- 

 quent writings were largely devoted to the geographical 

 distribution of plants, animals, and men. For many years 

 of his youth he was an active member of the Academy 

 of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. In the prosecu- 

 tion of such studies, after his return from the South 

 Seas, he visited India and eastern Africa. Dana, in one 

 of his notes, speaks of him as " a man of very exact 

 observation and measured words." 



After Dr. Pickering's death, in the seventy-third year 

 of his age, a very remarkable work of his, to which the 

 last sixteen years of his life had been devoted, was pub- 

 lished in Boston, under the supervision of Mrs. Pickering. 

 It is a quarto volume of twelve hundred pages, devoted 

 to the Chronological History of Plants : Man s Record of 

 his Own Existence Illustrated through their Names, Uses, 

 and Companionship. It is a monument of the author's 

 extraordinary industry and learning. Even the elaborate 

 index, which renders useful this vast accumulation of 

 facts, was the work of his own hand. As an introduction 

 to it, three biographical notices are printed, by Rev. 



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