Botany Prizes

Two EGGLESTON BOTANY PRIZES have been established from a fund given by Mrs. Willard W. Eggleston of Washington, D. C., as a memorial to her husband, a member of the Class of 1891. The prizes of $BO and $4O will be offered annually for botanical treatises on original investigation and study by undergraduates of the College who have elected one or more courses in botany and will be awarded for the first time at the end of this college year.

Mr. Eggleston, a graduate of the Chandler Scientific Course, worked for many years as a civil engineer, until in 1904 his botanical interest, active since his early years and further stimulated by work in systematic botany under Professor Henry S. Jesup while at Dartmouth, caused him to abandon engineering to become a research scholar at the New York Botanical Garden. He later entered the U. S. Department of Agriculture as an Assistant Botanist, remaining in government service until his retirement in 1933. Throughout his life an active student in systematic botany, he devoted much attention in his later years to the geographical distribution of native food and drug plants and became an authority on plants poisonous to stock on the western ranges.

Shortly before his death in 1935, he presented to the Jesup Herbarium at Dartmouth over 10,000 specimens of plants which he had collected during his extensive travels throughout the United States. Since his death, Mrs. Eggleston has given the College 5,000 additional herbarium specimens, his library of scientific books and papers, and his extensive correspondence with the botanists of his day.