Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/860

840 hours afterward, lying in the bottom of the boat, dead from heart disease.

The nature and variety of Dr. Lapham's scientific pursuits are illustrated by his biographer, Mr. S. S. Sherman, in an anecdote: "When asked, by a gentleman well known in scientific circles, in what department of science he was laboring, he replied, 'I am studying Wisconsin.'" The variety and accuracy of his knowledge made him a kind of encyclopædia—a ready reference on almost every subject; and Mr. Sherman fills several pages of his biography with a list of questions on which he was consulted by farmers, citizens, miners, archaeologists, amateurs, or scientific men like Professor Agassiz (to whom, apologizing at one time for not being able to send a better supply of certain fishes he had asked for, he pleaded that he was "not an expert fisherman"), Asa Gray, and Alfonso Wood. Professor Wood placed him "among the five or six most active and intelligent botanists in the country." Professor Gray declared him the pioneer botanist of his State, whose name would be inseparably connected with its flora, and called a new genus of plants after him, Laphamia. He was one of the founders of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts, an LL. D. (1860) of Amherst College, an honorary member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Copenhagen, and a member of most scientific associations of the United States. The list of his publications, some of the more important of which have already been indicated in the course of this article, numbers about forty-five titles. Ten of them are upon geological subjects, nine on subjects of botany and natural history, seven climatological and meteorological, three on the antiquities and the Indians of Wisconsin, three upon physical phenomena (the effects of the destruction of the forests, the great fires of 1871, and the great fresh-water lakes), and one is the article "Wisconsin" in the "American Cyclopædia." The others are topographical, or relate to miscellaneous subjects. The last was "The Laws of Embryonic Development the same in Plants as in Animals," which was published in the "American Naturalist" of May, 1875. Besides these, he left a mass of valuable notes and manuscripts, showing the fruits of industrious research.