﻿2 Memorial of Edward Tuckerman. 



an undergraduate. Applying for admission to the incoming 

 senior class, he remarked to President Quincy that his father 

 had broken the family tradition by sending him to another col- 

 lege, and that he proposed to correct the mistake. To the sug- 

 gestion, that, being already an alumnus of the Law School as 

 well as of Union, the University would willingly concede to 

 him the earlier degrees he sought, he replied that he proposed 

 to receive them in the ordinary way. He accordingly passed 

 the regular examinations, took the whole routine of the studies 

 of his class, and so was graduated with distinction in the class 

 of 1847, — a unique but characteristic illustration of a loyal 

 spirit, becoming "small by degrees and beautifully less,'' 



His passion for university study was not yet quite satiated. 

 For, two or three years later, he entered the Harvard Divinity 

 School, passed through its course of study and prescribed 

 exercises, — among them the delivery of a sermon in one of the 

 Cambridge churches, — and so, in the year 1852, he became for 

 the third time an alumnus of Harvard. 



In May, 1854, he married in Boston Sarah Eliza Sigourney 

 Cushing, who survives him, without offspring. Removing that 

 year to Amherst, he built, with excellent taste, upon a beauti- 

 ful site, the house which has ever since been their abode. Al- 

 though mainly devoted to botanical investigations, his first 

 official connection with Amherst College was that of Lecturer 

 in History, then that of Professor of Oriental History, down to 

 the year 1858, when he was collated to the chair of Botany r 

 which he held to the end of his life, although of late years 

 relieved from the duty of class instruction. The College did 

 itself the honor to confer upon its professor the degree of LL.D. 



We cannot say when or how Professor Tuckerman became 

 a botanist. But at an early period he was intimate with Dr. 

 Harris, then University Librarian, and with the ardent William 

 Oakes of Ipswich, upon whom, through Dr. Osgood of Dan- 

 vers, descended the mantle of Manasseh Cutler, of Essex 

 County, the earliest New England botanist. 



He must have been attracted to the Lichens almost from the 

 beginning. For his first publications were upon Lichens of 

 New England, largely those of his own collecting in the White 

 and Green Mountains, in two papers, one communicated to the 

 Boston Natural History Society in 1838 or 1839, the other in 

 1840. These were soon followed by papers on phaenogamous 

 botany, viz: one "On Oakesia a new Genus of the Order Era- 

 petreoe" a contribution made while he was abroad, in the sum- 

 mer of 1842, to Hooker's London Journal of Botany. Unfor- 

 tunately, the interesting plant which he thus dedicated to his 

 botanical associate, William Oakes, who well deserved such 

 commemoration, proved to be a second species of Corema. In 



