Horace Mann, Jr.
(1844 - 1868)


Horace Mann, Jr. was a young naturalist who accumulated an impressive herbarium of New England material and Hawaiian specimens. His herbarium would later form the original nucleus around which the Cornell University herbarium grew.


The Cornell Connection: After his untimely death, Mann's personal herbarium was purchased by Andrew Dickson White as the first accession into the Cornell University Herbarium.



Horace Mann, Jr. was born on February 25, 1844 in Boston, Massachusetts, son of Horace Mann, the educator. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1867. While at Harvard, Mann was an assistant under Asa Gray and an instructor of botany.

In 1861, at the age of 17, Mann accompanied Henry David Thoreau, the famous Victorian naturalist, on a trip to Minnesota to study plants and animals. Thoreau was in ill health and it was thought that the trip would help his condition. In 1864, Mann accompanied William T. Brigham, a Yale professor, on a collecting trip to the Hawaiian Islands. On this trip, he collected the holotype specimens of a number of Hawaiian plants. Although Mann wrote several articles about eastern U.S. plants, his most notable work was an "Enumeration of Hawaiian Plants" published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mann's untimely death occurred in 1868 from tuberculosis, leaving unfinished his "Flora of the Hawaiian Islands." His personal herbarium of ca. 12,500 sheets was purchased in 1869 by Andrew Dickson White as the first accession into the Cornell University Herbarium.

For further information please see:

Horace Mann Papers. Library of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University. www.herbaria.harvard.edu/Libraries

Stafleu, Frans A. and Cowan, Richard S. 1981. Taxonomic Literature, 2nd edition, vol. 3, pp.278-279.