124 SOME AMERICAN MEDICAL BOTANISTS 



Another event in 1817 occupied the professor's 

 serious attention quite as much as the sea-serpent: 

 this was the finding of a wife Mary, daughter 

 of Col. William Scollay, who bore him five chil- 

 dren, one of them Henry Jacob Bigelow, and 

 gave him " more than fifty years of uninterrupted 

 happiness." There is no record that he consulted 

 Sir Joseph Banks this time concerning the cor- 

 rectness of his discovery. 



At thirty, then, this young professor is found 

 with ability and courage equal to all the many 

 duties which crowded his day; moreover, he 

 had been made Rumford Professor of the Appli- 

 cation of Science to the Useful Arts, which was 

 worth $1,000 annually. Most of the lectures 

 were embodied in his Elements of Technology 

 (Boston, 1829). 



"In 1818, I began," he says, "to publish a 

 work on American Medical Botany, to consist of 



six half-volumes I involved myself in 



the difficult responsibility of investigating the 

 whole subject and of furnishing sixty plates and 

 sixty thousand colored engravings, which were 

 to be engraved in outline and the impressions 

 separately colored by hand. I soon found that I 

 had greatly over-rated the ability of my artists 

 and under-rated the time and labor necessary to 

 oversee the proceedings of the work. I came to the 

 conclusion that the only way of extricating myself 



