14 A. Gray — Botanical Necrology of '1885. 



untoward conditions. The interesting collection thus made 

 first opened to* our knowledge the botany of the western part 

 of Texas. It was published, as to the Polypetahe and Com* 

 positas, in the third volume of the Smithsonian Contributions 

 to Knowledge, as Planioz WrigJiliance, part 1, in 1852. 



A year and more was then passed in the central portion of 

 Texas, awaiting the opportunity for other distant explorations, 

 supporting himself in part by teaching a small school. At 

 length, in the spring of 1851, he joined the party under Col. 

 Graham, one of the commissioners for surveying and determin- 

 ing the United States and Mexican boundary from the Eio 

 Grande to the Pacific, accepting a position partly as botanist, 

 partty as one of the surveyors, which assured a comfortable 

 maintenance and the wished-for opportunity for botanical ex- 

 ploration in an untouched field. Attached only to Col. Gra- 

 ham's party, he returned with him without reaching farther 

 westward than about the middle of what is now the territory 

 of Arizona, and in the summer of 1852 he returned with his 

 extensive collections to San Antonio, and thence to Saint Louis, 

 to deliver his Cactaceas to Dr. Engelmann, and with the re- 

 mainder to Cambridge. These collections were the basis of the 

 second, part of Planioe. Wrightia?ice, published in 1853, and, in 

 connection with those of Dr. Parry, Professor Thurber and Dr. 

 J. M. Bigelow, etc., of the Botany of the Mexican Boundary 

 Survey, published in 1859. As Mr. Wright collected more 

 largely than his associate botanists, and divided his collections 

 into sets, his specimens are incorporated into a considerable 

 number of herbaria, at home and abroad, and are the types of 

 many new species and genera. No name is more largely com- 

 memorated in the botany -of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona 

 than that of Charles Wright. It is an Acanthaceous genus of 

 this district, of his own discovery, that bears the name of Carlo- 

 wrightia. Surely no botanist ever better earned such scientific 

 remembrance by entire devotion, acute observation, severe ex- 

 ertion, and perseverance under hardship and privation. 



Mr. Wright's next expedition was made under more pleas- 

 ant conditions. It was a long one, around the world, as botan- 

 ist to the North Pacific Exploring Expedition, fitted out under 

 Captain Ringgold, who was during the cruise succeeded by 

 Commander John Rodgers. After passing the winter of 1852-3 

 at his home in Connecticut and at Cambridge, he joined this 

 expedition in the spring, and sailed in the U. S. Ship Vin- 

 cennes from Norfolk, Virginia, on the 11th of June. The col- 

 lections made when touching at Madeira and Cape Verde were 

 of course unimportant; but at Simon's Bay, just round the 

 Cape of Good Hope, a stay of six weeks resulted in a very 

 considerable collection of about 800 species, within a small 



