﻿Memorial of Edward Tucker man. 3 



1843, at Schenectady, he privately printed and issued his 

 "Enumeratio Methodica Caricum quarundam," (pp. 21, 8vo), in 

 which he displayed not only his critical knowledge of the large 

 and difficult genus Carex, but also his genius as a systematizer ; 

 for this essay was the first considerable, and a really successful, 

 attempt to combine the species of this genus into natural 

 groups. It is wholly in Latin, which he much affected for 

 scientific disquisition as well as for technical characters, and 

 used with facility and elegance. In the same year also ap- 

 peared, in the American Journal of Science, the first of his 

 " Observations on some interesting Plants of New England." 

 This was followed in 1848 by a second, and in 1849 by a third 

 paper in the same Journal ; these containing, inter alia, his 

 elaboration of our species of Potamogeton, then for the first 

 time critically studied. These papers — with one or two in 

 Hovey's Magazine and elsewhere, at about the same date — 

 may be said to have ended his work in phaenogamous botany, 

 although his interest in the subject never died out. For when 

 he accepted the chair of Botany at Amherst he began the pre- 

 paration of "A Catalogue of Plants growing without cultiva- 

 tion within thirty miles of Amherst College," which he pub- 

 lished in the year 1875, the late Mr. Charles Frost of Brattle- 

 borough contributing the lower Cryptogamia other than the 

 Lichens. In matter and form, as well as in typography (in 

 which Professor Tuckerman had exquisite taste), this catalogue 

 is one of the very best. 



But it was to Lichenology that his strength, as indeed almost 

 his whole life, was most assiduously devoted. When, in his 

 youth, the active members of the newly organized Natural 

 History Society of' Boston divided among themselves the work 

 of making better known the animals, plants, and minerals of 

 Massachusetts, the study of the Lichens either was assigned to 

 him or he volunteered to undertake it. From this came those 

 earliest papers which have already been mentioned. Also his 

 Ct Synopsis of the Lichens of New England, the other Northern 

 States, and British America," communicated to this Academy 

 in the autumn of 1847, which is the most considerable botani- 

 cal contribution to the first volume of the Proceedings. The 

 fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh volumes contain other of his 

 lichenological papers, of wholly original matter and critical 

 character, — largely upon collections which had begun to come 

 to him from the Rocky Mountain region, from Texas, the 

 Pacific Coast, the Sandwich Islands, and especially from the 

 rich materials gathered in Cuba and elsewhere by the late 

 Charles Wright. In these years, too, he much helped the 

 study of his favorite plants by the preparation and issue of his 

 "Lichenes Americas Septentrionalis Exsiccati," in six fasciculi, 



