THOMAS NUTTALL. 2OQ 



markable for eloquence, but he always communicated to his 

 pupils something of his own passion for his favourite 

 science. 



At the end of 1822 Mr. Nuttall was called to Harvard Col- 

 lege. The fund of the college for a professorship of natural 

 history not being sufficient to support a professor, he was ap- 

 pointed merely Curator of the Botanic Garden, and but light 

 duties of instruction were assigned to him. In consequence 

 the greater part of his time was devoted to the culture of rare 

 plants and to* his own studies, in which mineralogy and orni- 

 thology were included. In Cambridge, as in Philadelphia, he 

 led a retired life. 



In editing the Letters of Asa Gray Mrs. Gray remarks: 

 "The garden was laid out by Dr. Peck in 1808, and the house 

 built for him was finished in 1810. Mr. Nuttall, the botanist 

 and ornithologist, who boarded in it while giving instruction 

 in botany, left some curious traces behind him. He was very 

 shy of intercourse with his fellows, and having for his study 

 the southeast room, and the one above for his bedroom, put in 

 a trapdoor in the floor of an upper connecting closet, and so 

 by a ladder could pass between his rooms without the chance 

 of being met in the passage or on the stairs. A flap hinged 

 and buttoned in the door between the lower closet and the 

 kitchen allowed his meals to be set in on a tray without the 

 chance of his being seen. A window he cut down into an outer 

 door, and with a small gate in the board fence surrounding the 

 garden, of which he alone had the key, he could pass in and 

 out safe from encountering any human being." 



Aware that he was doing little for science, Mr. Nuttall be- 

 came dissatisfied with his position at Cambridge; he used to 

 say that he was only vegetating, like his own plants. Con- 

 genial occupation was furnished him for a time by the sug- 

 gestion of Mr. James Brown, who was probably his only inti- 

 mate friend in Cambridge, that he write a. book on ornithol- 

 ogy. He had given more or less attention to this science dur- 

 ing almost the whole of his residence in America, and readily 

 adopted the suggestion. He set to work with great zeal, and 

 in 1832 produced his Manual of the Ornithology of the United 

 States and Canada. It was published in two volumes of about 

 six hundred pages each and illustrated with excellent wood- 

 cuts. In the course of his residence at Cambridge he contrib- 



