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BIGELOW

was founded, and Best was appointed curator and artist. In the autumn of 1820, he delivered a course of experimental lectures on electricity. At this time he was appointed assistant to the profes- sor of chemistry in the Medical College of Ohio, and in 1823 removed to Lexington, Kentucky, having been appointed lec- turer on chemistry in Transylvania Uni- versity. While there he published a number of papers entitled: "Tables of Chemical Equivalents, Incompatible Sub- stances, and Poisons and Antidotes," with an explanatory introduction. In 1826 he graduated at Transylvania and began practice immediately after, rising rapid- ly in the profession, but was unfortu- nately cut down by consumption in the beginning of his career, and died in 1830. A. G. D.

Bigelow, Jacob (1787-1879).

A great educational reformer, and one of America's most learned botanists. Jacob Bigelow was connected in every way with the leading scientists of the world. He was of New England ancestry, his people coming over about 1640 and settling in Watertown, Massachusetts, and Jacob was the son of Jacob Bigelow, congregational minister, who married a daughter of one Gershom Flagg. Jacob the younger was born on the twenty- seventh of February, 1787, and his child- hood was passed in the country at farm- work, with scanty schooling. Painfully his father managed to send him to Har- vard where he graduated in 1806, and in 1808 attended the medical lectures there while acting as pupil under Dr. John Gorharn and teaching in the Boston Latin School. Then on to Philadelphia for the lectures of Rush, Wistar, Barton and Cove and the doctor's degree. To bring himself early before the profession- al public he took to writing and secured the Boylston prize four successive years. So promising seemed his career that the elder James Jackson chose him as as- sociate in practice. He was a born artist, craftsman, and inventor. When occasion came for illustrating his

"Medical Botany" (1S17-20) with en- gravings and before photography or lithographing were invented, he devised a means of illustration which proved both practical and beautiful and furnish- ed sixty plates and 6,000 colored en- gravings for this monumental and now rare work. He speaks laughingly of his first lesson in botany given when as a little boy he asked a learned gentleman the name of the plant Star of Bethlehem. "That? Why that's grass, you little fool." When he wished for drawings and models for his lectures as Rumford professor he knew how to make them. In 1812 his interest in the study of botany led him to give a course of public lectures in Boston.

Botany was his great hobby, and "Florida Bostoniensis" (1814) was a charming book well known to our grand- fathers. In 1S15 he was appointed lecturer on materia medica and botany and two years later when he was thirty they changed his title to professor. Then, too, as first Rumford professor it is pleas- ant to believe that Rumford left behind him in his native state a young disciple who fulfilled all his desires. But the work which brought Bigelow into closest contact with European savants and gave him honor in his own country was the elaborate series published under the title "American Medical Botany," which for finish and beauty and avoidance of technical terms makes it desirable to-day. In 1820, when thirty-three, he was as- sociated with Spaulding, Hewson, Ives and Butts in editing the "United States Pharmacopoeia." He followed up this labor by adding Bigelow's Sequel, a perspicuous commentary on current remedies.

Three years previously he had married Mary, daughter of Col. William Scollay of Boston and they had five children, one son, Henry, becoming adoctor.

When the great cholera epidemic of 1832 in New York carried off some 3,000 victims, Boston's death roll num- bered only one hundred owing to the authorities being wise enough to adopt the stringent sanitary precautions urged