OBITUARY NOTICES. 
497 
CHARLES CHRISTOPHER PARRY. 
[Read before the Society October 15, 1892.] 
Charles Christopher Parry was born at Admington, Wor¬ 
cestershire, England, August 28,1823, and died at Davenport, 
Iowa, February 20,1890. His parents were in moderate cir¬ 
cumstances, and to better their condition came to America 
in 1832. They settled on a farm in Washington county, 
New York, in a locality since made classical by the labors 
of Dr. John Torrey. Parry early became acquainted with 
Drs. Torrey and Gray, then engaged in the preparation of 
their “ Flora of North America,” and, stimulated and en¬ 
couraged by their friendship, he imbibed that love of nature 
which was ever afterward the actuating impulse of his life. 
He graduated at Union College, Schenectady, New York, 
and afterward took a medical course at the College of 
Physicians and Surgeons, in New York city. 
At the age of twenty-three he moved to Iowa, settling at 
Davenport, which thereafter remained his home, so far as 
he had any abiding place. So far as known, he practiced 
his profession for a few months only. In 1848 he began his 
real work as an explorer by becoming associated with David 
Dale Owen’s geological survey of the northwest. His first 
collections were made along the St. Peter river and up the 
St. Croix as far as Lake Superior. In 1849 he was appointed 
botanist to the Mexican boundary survey, and the results of 
his indefatigable enterprise are recorded in the publications 
of that survey. His first field work with this survey was a 
voyage by way of the isthmus of Panama to San Diego, 
California. This was repeated in 1850, owing to the loss, in 
a storm, of the previous collection. In 1851 he visited El 
Paso, on the Rio Grande, and made extensive collections in 
a region never before and rarely since visited by a botanist. 
In 1861 he began, at his own expense, a series of explora¬ 
tions in the Rocky Mountain region, particularly the higher 
65—Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 12. 
