BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Vv 
residual hours, which most men use for rest or recreation, to scientific pursuits, — mainly to bot- 
any, yet not exclusively. He was much occupied with meteorology. On establishing his home at 
St. Louis, he began a series of thermometrical and barometrical observations, which he continued 
regularly and systematically to the last, when at home always taking the observations himself, — the 
indoor ones even up to the last day but one of his life. Even in the last week he was seen sweep- 
ing a path through the snow in his garden to reach his maximum and minimum thermometers. His 
latest publication (issued since his death by the St. Louis Academy of Sciences) is a digest and full 
representation of the thermometrical part of these observations for forty-seven years. He apologizes 
for not waiting the completion of the half-century before summing up the results, and shows that 
these could not after three more years be appreciably different. 
A list of Dr. Engelmann’s botanical papers and notes, collected by his friend and associate 
Professor Sargent, and published in Coulter's Botanical Gazette for May, 1884, contains about one 
hundred entries, and is certainly not quite complete. His earliest publication, his inaugural the- 
sis already mentioned (De Antholysi Prodromus), is a treatise upon teratology in its relations to 
morphology. It is a remarkable production for the time and for a mere medical student with 
botanical predilections. There is an interesting recent analysis of it in “ Nature,” for April 24, by 
Dr. Masters, the leading teratologist of our day, who compares it with Moquin-Tandon’s more 
elaborate Z'ératologie Végétale, published ten years afterwards, and who declares that “when we 
compare the two works from a philosophical point of view, and consider that the one was a mere 
college essay, while the other was the work of a professed botanist, we must admit that Engelmann’s 
treatise, so far as it goes, affords evidence of deeper insight into the nature and causes of the 
deviations from the ordinary conformation of plants than does that of Moquin.” 
Transferred to the valley of the Mississippi and surrounded by plants most of which still 
needed critical examination, Dr. Engelmann’s avocation in botany and his mode of work were 
marked out for him. Nothing escaped his attention; he drew with facility; and he methodically 
secured his observations by notes and sketches, available for his own after-use and for that of his 
correspondents. But the lasting impression which he has made upon North American botany is due 
to his wise habit of studying his subjects in their systematic relations, and of devoting himself to a 
particular genus or group of plants (generally the more difficult) until he had elucidated it as com- 
pletely as lay within his power. In this way all his work was made to tell effectively. Thus his first 
monograph was of the genus Cuscwta (published in the “ American Journal of Science,” in 1842), of 
which when Engelmann took it up we were supposed to have only one indigenous species, and that 
not peculiar to the United States, but which he immediately brought up to fourteen species without 
going west of the Mississippi valley. In the year 1859, after an investigation of the whole genus in 
the materials scattered through the principal herbaria of Europe and this country, he published in 
the first volume of the St. Louis Academy of Sciences a systematic arrangement of all the Cuseute, 
characterizing seventy-seven species, besides others classed as perhaps varieties. Mentioning here 
only -monographical subjects, we should next refer to his investigations of the Cactus family, upon 
which his work was most extensive and important, as well as particularly difficult, and upon which 
Dr. Engelmann’s authority is of the very highest. He essentially for the first time established the 
arrangement of these plants upon floral and carpological characters. This formidable work was 
begun in his sketch of the Botany of Dr. A. Wislizenus’s Expedition from Missouri to Northern 
Mexico, in the latter’s memoir of this tour, published by the United States Senate. It was followed 
up by his account (in the “American Journal of Science,” 1852) of the Giant Cactus on the Gila 
(Cereus giganteus) and an allied species; by his synopsis of the Cactacez of the United States, pub- 
lished in the “Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” 1856; and by his two 
illustrated memoirs upon the Southern and Western species, one contributed to the fourth volume of 
the series of Pacific Railroad Expedition Reports, the other to Emory’s Report on the Mexican 
