JACOB BIGELOW. 415 



botany for the region. What a popular and satisfactory work 

 it was, especially to hundreds of amateur botanists, some still 

 living may testify. 



The third and last edition, issued in 1840, was a reprint, 

 with various additions and corrections, furnished mainly from 

 those who had learned their botany from the preceding one. 

 This is the last Flora or Manual of this and perhaps any 

 other country, arranged upon the Linnsean artificial system. 

 Much later in life the author contemplated a revision of the 

 work, brought up to the time and illustrated by chromo- 

 lithographic plates, such as we have lately seen turned to good 

 account. But after some consideration the project was aban- 

 doned. He did not propose himself to undertake the editorial 

 work ; for he had long since passed from actual service into 

 the emeritus or honorary rank of botanists ; and his active 

 professional life, already verging to its close, was diversified 

 or relieved by other avocations. Indeed, some of these were 

 taken up very early. He became Rumford professor of the 

 applications at Cambridge in 1816, and delivered annual 

 courses of lectures until 1827, when he published the sub- 

 stance of them in a volume entitled " Elements of Technol- 

 ogy," here coining this apt word. During all this time, and 

 much longer, he was professor of Materia Medica in the medi- 

 cal school of Harvard University, namely from 1815 to 1855 ; 

 for many of these years one of the physicians of the Massa- 

 chusetts General Hospital ; through all of them, and until old 

 age disabled him, a leading physician of Boston. From the 

 year 1847 to 1863 he was president of the American Academy 

 of Arts and Sciences, of which body he was a member for 

 sixty-seven years ! 



We cannot here refer to Dr. Bigelow's various professional 

 and literary writings. They are not numerous, but are weighty. 

 His treatise on " Nature in Disease," which contains the fa- 

 mous discourse " On Self-limited Disease," is the most impor- 

 tant of them ; and an address " On the Limits of Education," 

 delivered in the year 1865 before the Massachusetts Institute 

 of Technology, is notable. It has been said of the latter, that 

 never before was the depreciation of classical study or general 



