No. 392] ALVIN WENTWORTH CHAPMAN. 645 
he went into the woods, a hundred miles from home, in mid- 
winter, and made an extensive collection of woody plants in 
their resting state, finding, as he wrote, no little pleasure in 
making the acquaintance of many old plant friends in an 
unwonted guise ; and several of the larger herbaria are enriched 
by the fruits of his work in the field during the last five years 
of his life. Early in 1898 he went to a favorite collecting 
ground at Aspalago, just below where the Flint and Chatta- 
hoochee rivers join to form the Apalachicola, and had entered 
upon the preparation of a suite of the beautiful specimens for 
which he was noted, when an attack of vertigo, the true signifi- 
cance of which he well knew, ended his active labors. “At the 
age of fourscore years and ten,” he wrote, “I have closed the 
book.” And, indeed, from the time of his return from his last 
collecting trip until death put a final term to the activity of his 
mind, he was, perforce, content to thumb over and arrange the 
material in his hands, and to hope that others might make of it 
that use which was denied him. And yet he did not admit even 
to himself that he could do nomore. The writer had the privi- 
lege of a long-promised and long-deferred visit to him shortly 
before the holidays last winter, and could scarcely prevent him 
from running out “only about a mile” to point out the habitat 
- of a rare and local shrub. ‘Come back in the spring,” said he, 
«and I’ll try and be well enough to show you some of my col- 
lecting grounds, — though,” he added, “I'll not take you to my 
boarding places there, for I don’t think you could stand them.” 
And even within a month of his death he walked nearly three 
miles to secure a d€sired specimen. 
Few men have the natural endowment of so great modesty 
and disposition to retirement as Dr. Chapman possessed. His 
herbarium specimens are commonly marked “ So. FI.,”’ to indi- 
cate that they were accepted in his Flora as properly bearing 
the names on the labels ; but his own name rarely appears on 
his earlier labels, and is found appended to few published plant 
names. Running over his last spring’s collections with the 
writer last winter, as one novelty after another was passed in 
review and its characters indicated, he would say: “ But, you 
know, even if I were not at the end of my work, I should prefer 
