American agrostologist. Albert Spear Hitchcock was born in Owasso, Michigan, grew up in Nebraska and Kansas, and in 1884 was the youngest of his class to graduate from Iowa State Agricultural College. He was hired as an assistant in chemistry the next year and while earning his master's degree pursued his interest in botany under the tutelage of Professor Charles E. Bessey. In 1886, at just 21 years old, he was appointed as a chemistry instructor at Iowa State University. After three years, however, he decided to make botany his full-time occupation and left the university to become librarian and curator of the herbarium at Missouri Botanical Garden and instructor at the Engelmann School of Botany, Washington University.

In 1890 he visited the West Indies for three months with J.T. Rothrock of the University of Pennsylvania, his first botanical expedition outside the United States. In 1892 he became professor of botany and botanist to the experiment station at Kansas State Agricultural College, remaining there for nine years. During this period he embarked in earnest on his research of grass genera, travelling extensively to obtain specimens. He produced over 80 papers and reports with the result that in 1901 he was appointed assistant chief of the Division of Agrostology at the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington.

In 1905 he was promoted to systematic agrostologist and put in charge of the newly established Grass Herbarium, which he maintained until his death. To build the collection, he visited all parts of the United States and many parts of the rest of the world, usually in the company of his wife and sons who served as his botanical assistants. He collected more than 25,000 numbers, mostly grasses. In 1928 he was named principal botanist in charge of systematic agrostology.

His major publications are A Textbook of Grasses (1914), The Genera of Grasses of the United States (1920), Methods of Descriptive Systematic Botany (1925), Manual of the Grasses of the United States (1935), and Manual of the Grasses of the West Indies (1936), as well as monographs of the American species of Agrostis, Leptochloa, Panicum, and Aristida. Furthermore, it is largely due to his efforts that the "type concept", the idea of basing names upon a type specimen, was adopted in the botanical world. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Research Council, the Botanical Society of America, the Organization Committee for Biological Research of the National Research Council and the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research in Tropical America. During the construction of the Panama Canal, he originated and pushed the idea of preserving part of the tropical jungle in the "Canal Zone", and as a result Barro Colorado Island was made a permanent reserve. Hitchcock died of heart failure on board the steamer City of Norfolk, homeward bound from Europe, after attending the International Botanical Congress at Amsterdam and visiting the grass collections of several large herbaria in preparation for a work on the grass genera of the world.

Sources:
R. Rankin, L.E. Melchers and W.B. Wilson, 1936, "Albert Spear Hitchcock", Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 39: 36-38
Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation:
http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Art/HitchcockChase.shtml.