WATSON, SERENO

(b. East Windsor Hill, Connecticut, 1 December 1826; d. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 9 March 1892), botany.

Watson was the ninth of the thirteen children of Henry Watson and Julia Reed Watson, both descendants of early Connecticut settlers. Henry Watson was a merchant in the village of East Windsor but moved to the nearby ancestral farm at East Windsor Hill when his father died, shortly after Sereno’s birth. The pleasant rural childhood contributed to the boy’s love of nature and to his lifelong diffidence.

After preparatory work at East Windsor Hill Academy, Watson attended Yale College, graduatingin 1847 . He intended to enter medicine and for some years studied under several physicians in New England and New York, and under his brother Louis in Illinois, alternating his studies with various teaching posts. Neither medicine nor teaching appealed to him, so in 1856 he joined another brother in Greensboro, Alabama, where he was secretary of the Planter’s Insurance Company until the Civil War began. He left the South to work on the Journal of Education in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1861 to 1866 and then attended the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale for a year.

Without definite purpose Watson sailed for California via Panama in 1867. From the Sacramento valley he walked across the Sierra Nevada to volunteer on Clarence King’s geological exploration of the fortieth parallel. Among other duties he assisted William Whitman Bailey in botanical collections, since he had enjoyed plant collecting earlier as a minor hobby. Bailey’s health was poor; and when he left in March 1868, Watson become the survey’s official botanist. He collected extensively in Nevada and Utah. A year later he returned east to study his collections in the herbarium of Daniel C. Eaton at Yale, and in 1870 he removed to Asa Gray’s herbarium at Harvard to continue his survery report and botanical studies. In 1874 he became the curator of the Gray Herbarium, and from 1881 to 1884 he was also instructor in phytography at Harvard.

Watson’s contributions to botany began with the fifth volume of the fortieth parallel survey (1871), which lists 1,325 plant species and describes and illustrates many of them. This classic was the first account of the distinctive xerophytic and mesophytic vegetation of the Great Basin region. It was also the first example of Watson’s painstaking meticulousness in defining the systematics of plants.

In 1873 Watson began compiling the systematic botany of California, started earlier by William H. Brewer, who turned over his material to Watson. This significant work was presented in two volumes in 1876 and 1880. Simultaneously Watson undertook the almost impossible task of indexing all plant species west of the Mississippi River, on which scattered accounts and descriptions had already been published in the accounts of many western explorations. The only completed volume from this undertaking was the very useful one on Polypetalae (1878).

Asa Gray had been revising his classic Manual of the Botany of Northern United States before his death in 1888, after which Watson and John M. Coulter completed the work. Most of Watson’s other botanical works were published under the title “Contributions to American Botany,” in various journals. These, and his separately published works, constitute a fine contribution to plant systematics and relationships.

Watson received an honorary Ph.D. from Iowa College in 1878, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1889. He never married and, from lifelong shyness, he never presented his papers in person.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Watson’s most significant works, cited in the text, are Botany, vol. V of United States Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (Washington, D.C., 1871); Botany of California, 2 vols, (Cambridge, Mass., 1876, 1880) (I , Polypetalae, was written with W. H. Brewer); Bibliographical Index to North American Botany… Part I, Polupetalae (Washigton, D.C., 1878); and Gray’s Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States…, 6th ed. (New York-Cincinnati-Chicago, 1889; reissued with corrections, 1890). These and Watson’s other publications are listed in the biography by Brewer (see below).

II. Secondary Literature. William H. Brewer wrote the only extensive account of Watson’s life: Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences. 5 (1903), 267–290 (the year of birth is given incorrectly as 1820). A short account by “M.B” appeared in Scientific American,65 (1892), 233–234.

Elizabeth Noble Shor