Clark, Henry James, 1826-1873

Trichodina pediculus

The first professor of Natural History at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Henry James Clark, had one of the briefest and most tragic tenures of any member of the faculty during the nineteenth century. Born in Easton, Mass., on June 22, 1826, the son of Rev. Henry Porter and Abigail Jackson (Orton) Clark, Henry was raised primarily in Brooklyn, N.Y. After graduating from the City University of New York in 1848, Clark took a job teaching in White Plains. Already interested in the local flora, his wife recalled that he contacted the great botanist at Harvard, Asa Gray, after discovering a flower that he thought might be new to science. With Gray's encouragement, Clark resumed his studies in 1850, working under both Gray and Louis Agassiz, and graduating from the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1854.

...