| Horace Mann, Jr. was a botanist from Massachusetts whose plant collection became the first acquisition for the Cornell University herbarium in 1869. Mann, son of the educator Horace Mann Sr., attended Harvard University where he was herbarium assistant to Asa Gray. He collected widely in the northeastern United States, and in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) with William T. Brigham in 1864. At 17, Mann had accompanied Henry David Thoreau on a trip to Minnesota, when the famous naturalist and philosopher sought respite from tuberculosis. Mann himself succumbed to the disease at the age of 24, and his personal herbarium of some 12,500 specimens was purchased by the first president of Cornell, Andrew Dickson White. Though Mann's list of his Hawaiian collections, Enumeration of Hawaiian Plants had been published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1867, his account of the flora remained unfinished at the time of his death. |
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