BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES 



OF 



DR. CHARLES PICKERING. 



The Life of this distinguished naturalist is to be found in his works. His time, 

 thought, and strength were given to them. They bear marks of the painstaking, 

 patient, thoughtful, conscientious student, whose life was spent in the search after 

 truth. He seemed to be the most equable and unexcitable of men ; but underneath 

 that quiet exterior was an enthusiasm which no dangers or difficulties could daunt, 

 and which no amount of labor or length of time could chill. The love of knowledge 

 in his chosen sphere was with him at once a governing principle and a ruling passion. 

 It showed itself in his childhood, and continued as long as he lived. An early friend, 

 Mr. John L. Gardner, speaking of the boyhood of Mr. John C. Lee, says : " You are 

 right in supposing that our early rambles in Wenham were favorable to the cultivation 

 and improvement of his natural liking for the wonders of animal and vegetable life ; 

 for our companion was Charles Pickering, a born naturalist, who seemed instinc- 

 tively to know all the habits and resorts of flying and creeping things, and has since 

 become one of our most distinguished men of science."* At the time here referred 

 to, Charles Pickering could not have been more than nine years old. But the passion 

 which in his early boyhood gave him such an influence with his associates, only 

 increased in strength with advancing years. It carried him into almost every corner 

 of the earth in his search after facts pertaining to his favorite science. Nothing to 

 him was common or unclean, if only it could throw some additional light on that. 

 No weed was looked upon by him as worthless ; no place seemed inaccessible ; no 

 ancient monuments or hieroglyphics were given up by him as illegible or unintelli- 

 gible; no plodding through the dusty records of the remotest antiquity was wearisome 

 to him, — if only it promised to furnish some new fact, which might add to the com- 

 pleteness of his work. We doubt if any one naturalist ever united in himself, so far 

 as he did, the qualities of an exact original observer on the most enlarged scale and 

 of an inquirer into all that had been learned before. His minute, laborious, and 

 extended explorations, into all possible records of past ages, seemed of themselves 

 more than enough for the work of a lifetime. It almost makes one's head ache to 



* Memorial of John Clarke Lee, by Rev. E. B. Willson, p. 8. 



