Lapham, however, was never designed for a business man, and he never acquired more than a very modest competence in life. I have spoken of the speculative mania which then pervaded all the newer West merely to illustrate the sincerity of the young immigrant’s devotion to scholarship, from the pursuit of which even the thrill and intoxication of perhaps the greatest boom the country has ever witnessed could detain him only momentarily. Within two weeks of his arrival at Milwaukee he records that he has made a map of the county (possibly a professional matter) and “done a little botanizing.” Even earlier, while at Detroit en route to the West, he had taken time to write Professor Asa Gray an offer to collect for him specimens from the new region to which the writer was going. “Let me entreat you to pay particular attention to my _pets_, the grasses,” wrote the noted botanist in reply; “I will see that you have due credit for every interesting discovery.” Six weeks after his arrival at Milwaukee Lapham wrote to another botanical friend that he found many new plants at Milwaukee; and that “in order to inform my friends of what plants are found here and to enable them to indicate such as they want I think of publishing a catalogue of such as I find.” Thus was conceived the idea responsible for the first publication of a scientific character within the bounds of the present state of Wisconsin, for before the close of the year there issued from the office of Milwaukee’s newly founded newspaper a _Catalogue of Plants and Shells, Found in the Vicinity of Milwaukee, on the West Side of Lake Michigan_, by I. A. Lapham. It would probably be safe to affirm that this was the first scientific work to be published west of the Great Lakes, at least to the north of St. Louis. For in literary matters Chicago, whose commercial progress Milwaukee never succeeded in equalling, must yield the palm of leadership to her early North Shore rival. Leaving out of consideration one or two lyceum lectures which were printed after delivery, the earliest Chicago imprint of a scholarly character of which I have any knowledge is Mrs. Kinzie’s well-known story of the Chicago massacre, published as a pamphlet in 1844; and this, a reminiscent family narrative, does not deserve to be regarded as scholarly in the true sense of the term.