6 The America it Geologist. January, 1894 
concord in demanding his appointment. No one else knew so 
much about the state as he, and he had evinced his capacity 
for conducting such a research into its natural features. Lap- 
ham, therefore, was more than a geologist when he undertook 
the survey of Wisconsin ; he was fortified for the task by 
many years of the most diversified training and experience. 
In reviewing his life and work, therefore, while this sketch 
naturally dwells most on his geological work, it would obvi- 
ously be a partial and very imperfect account, if it omitted 
to present brienj" his other scientific contributions. His most 
elaborate finished work was, perhaps, his description and 
illustration of the aboriginal earth-works of Wisconsin, pub- 
lished by the Smithsonian Institution, but his most lengthy 
and persistent was his geological. This he began as a youth, 
and this he laid down but a few months before his death. 
W T e can divide his works, so far as published, under the 
following heads : 
1. Botanical ; 2. Olimatological ; 3. Archeological ; 4. Car- 
tographical ; 5. Geological; and 0. Miscellaneous. 
]. Botanical Work. 
Lapham was familiar with the botany of the plnenogamous 
plants before he arrived in Wisconsin. He at once began a 
systematic, careful cataloguing of the plants of the state. 
He was an excellent draughtsman. Some of the delicate draw- 
ings of the minute parts of grasses, contained in his unpub- 
lished "Gramineae of the United States,'" have almost the 
exact shadings of lithographs. In 1830 he ventured to print 
a "catalogue of the plants and shells found in the vicinity of 
Milwaukee."* In 1838, and again in 1840 he reissued this 
catalogue with many additions. In the first volume of the 
Transactions of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society is 
an admirable treatise of nearly one hundred pages, on the 
"Grasses of AVisconsin and adjoining states." He pursued the 
subject of the grasses of the country with great eagerness, and 
*"My first acquaintance with Dr. Lapham was in 1846, when one 
morning there landed [at Racine] from the steamer Sultana a small 
man with a large collecting box hanging at his side. He came from 
Milwaukee and intended returning on foot along the lake shore in or- 
der to collect plants and shells — no easy journey, encumbered, as he 
soon would be, with a well-filled specimen box. He spoke lightly of the 
undertaking, saying he had performed similar feats before." Dr. P. R. 
Hot, in Trans. Wis. Acad.Sci., Arts and Let., vol. iii,p.2G5. 
