476 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [JUNE 
his entomological and meteorological work. He furnished to the 
Institution the first specimen of the chrysalides of some of the butter- 
flies of Apalachicola, with a report upon their plant food. At that 
time he had a large collection of southern lepidoptera. His spare 
time, however, was soon altogether devoted to botanical work, by which 
he became most widely known in the scientific world. Disinclined, by 
his unassuming disposition, to speak about himself, little is known of 
the beginning of his botanical career. There is no doubt that it 
received a great impetus in his meeting Mr. Stephen Croom which 
took place soon after Dr. Chapman had entered upon the practice of 
his profession at Marianna in 1839. A wealthy planter, possessing 
plantations near that place and Aspalaga, Fla., Mr. Croom had given 
great promise as a botanist by his discovery of Zorreya taxifolia and 
by his monograph of Sarracenia. This acquaintance led to a close 
friendship until the sad death of Mr. Croom, who perished, with his 
wife and all his children, in the foundering of the ill-fated ship ‘ Home” 
between New York and Charleston. By this accident the plans for 
the thorough exploration of Florida in connection with Dr. Chapman 
were frustrated.’ 
From the time of his settling in Quincy, Fla., the Doctor became 
a frequent contributor of plants from this section to the authors of the 
flora of North America, Drs. Torrey and Gray, and their life-long 
friend. In their work they dedicated an interesting genus of the 
western coast of Florida, as they remarked, “to our friend Dr. A. W. 
Chapman, an accurate and indefatigable botanist, who largely contrib- 
uted to our knowlege of plants from middle Florida.’ 
After the publication of Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern 
United States (1848), the want of a work on a similar plan, giving 
an account of the southern states east of the Mississippi, was severely 
felt by botanists, by authors as well as by the students, in the field and 
the classroom, and particularly in the South, its botanical realm being 
almost unknown and without a guide. Urged by their contemporaries, 
the Rev. Dr. M. A. Curtis, of North Carolina, was to join Dr. Chapman 
in the undertaking of writing a flora of the southern states. Deeply 
engaged upon southern mycology and under the pressure of the duties 
of his calling, Mr. Curtis had to withdraw from this task, which thus fell 
to the sole charge of Dr. Chapman. He certainly must have entered 
*Sargent: Scientific papers of Asa Gray 2: 195. 
* Torrey and Gray: Flora N. Amer. I: 355. 1840. 
