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Mycologia 



yourself and your distinguished Preceptor, Prof. Eaton, at 

 the beginning of your pubHc career. Though I was then too 

 young to be admitted to your course of instruction, an im- 

 pulse was then given which never abated, and now, forty 

 years afterward, returns back to you with this humble • 

 offering. The contribution is, therefore, most appropriately 

 put in your hands by 



Your friend ^.nd servant, 



M. A. Curtis." 



The significance of this reference is apparent when it is re- 

 called that in 1817 Amos Eaton (8) after two years at Yale 

 chiefly under the tuition of Silliman, returned to Williams Col- 

 lege, from which he had graduated in 1799, and there offered 

 courses in geology and botany. As far as the writers have been 

 able to determine, Eaton was not a member of the faculty, but 

 with the enthusiastic approval of the faculty gave his courses to 

 such students as chose to take them and among these students 

 was Emmons. 



Encouraged by the success of his work at Williams, Eaton 

 gave courses of popular lectures on botany at various places in 

 New England and New York. Prof. A. Hopkins (brother of 

 Mark Hopkins) gives a striking description of Eaton* and his 

 methods and refers to the fact that his " young pupil Emmons " 

 was employed to collect plants for the demonstrations which 

 accompanied the lectures. It is highly probable that the lecture 

 so vividly described by Hopkins was delivered in his home town 

 of Stockbridge and that Curtis, then nine years of age, may have 

 attended the lecture. " The course of Instruction," to which 

 Curtis refers, may have been that given in the nearby Lenox 

 Academy in the spring of 1819 (8, p. 361). At any rate, as his 

 own letter testifies, Curtis received his earliest botanical inspira- 

 tion from the vigorous popular lecturer who had earlier encour- 

 aged Torrey (13, p. 136), and whose "Manual of Botany" was 

 Asa Gray's first botanical text. 



4 Durfee (8, p. 360) gives a good biographical notice of Amos Eaton, 

 which is copied by Nason (i6) and used as a basis of the sketch published in 

 Popular Science Monthly. There is also a good life of Eaton by Harlan H. 

 Ballard in Collections of the Berkshire Historical and Scientific Society, pp. 

 185-234, 1897, and a sketch of his geological work in Merrill (15). 



