Biography

United States botanical collector. Born into a farming family in East Charlotte, Vermont, Cyrus Guernsey Pringle enrolled in Classics at the University of Vermont in 1859, but in his first semester was forced by the death of his older brother to return home to help his widowed mother manage the farm. An avid and skilled horticulturalist who published his findings in The Country Gentleman and other journals, he made hybridizing experiments with various crops and sold the marketing rights of some of his successes to a seedhouse in New York. One of his crop-bred potato varieties, "Ruby", was awarded a first-class certificate from the London Horticulture Society in 1870.

As a devout Quaker, Pringle suffered persecution during the Civil War for refusing the draft or any service in lieu that would support the war effort. His case was eventually brought before President Lincoln, who personally intervened with the Secretary of War to have him paroled and discharged from duty. After his ordeal, he returned to his farm and continued his work as a plant breeder.

Beginning in October 1872, when he received a request from George Davenport for specimens of native Vermont ferns, he began collecting plants for various eminent American botanists, mainly from the Boston area. When his wife left him to engage in evangelical work, taking custody of their daughter and formally divorcing him five years later, Pringle left off plant breeding almost entirely and turned his efforts to botanical collecting. As a member of the Vermont Board of Agriculture in 1875, he prepared a paper on "Grasses of Vermont", which was illustrated with 60 herbarium specimens. Between 1880 and 1884, Pringle collected in the western United States, and into Sonora, to satisfy three commissions: general collections for Asa Gray of Harvard University; specimens to complete the Jessup Collection of North American Woods at the American Museum of Natural History; and systematic, geographical, and economic data for the United States Census Department.

In 1884 he replaced H.H. Rusby on the botanical survey of Arizona for the Smithsonian Institution. Then, for 26 years he explored the flora of Mexico as a plant collector for Harvard's Gray Herbarium, undertaking 39 expeditions between 1885 and 1909, some lasting as long as ten months. At first he collected insects, especially beetles and butterflies, as well as flowering plants and ferns, but shortly abandoned his zoological collections. His total collection of over 500,000 herbarium specimens, about 12 percent of which were new to science, includes many Mexican type specimens. He collected a total of 15,719 separate taxa in 21 of the 30 Mexican states. Choosing different routes to Mexico in order to cover as much of his own country as possible on the journey down, he usually entered at El Paso, but occasionally via Eagle Pass. He preferred botanizing alone or with a single assistant. On his earliest trips these were sturdy young farmhands from Vermont and Maine, but he soon discovered that in that climate they were subject to fever and often had to be sent home. Afterwards, all his assistants were Mexican, including Filemon Lozano, his trusted companion for many years. Sometimes he would accompany other botanists from the United States, such as Edward Palmer, E.W. Nelson or E.A. Goldman from the Smithsonian and, on four separate occasions, the eminent pine taxonomist George Russell Shaw, author of The Pines of Mexico.

Unmounted material was brought back to Pringle's Charlotte farmhouse to be mounted, sorted, and sent on to the Gray Herbarium, or to individual experts elsewhere, for determination. His salary, which was conditional on available resources at the herbarium and botanical museum, was periodically cut or withdrawn completely. On one such occasion, he considered selling his private herbarium to the American Museum of Natural History to obtain money for further explorations. He was saved from doing so by a loan from Asa Gray's widow; and before her death, she burned the notes for the loan in his presence, as a gift to science in memory of her husband, who had given Pringle the title facile princeps amongst all botanical collectors of the time.

From 1888 onward, Pringle was engaged by the Mexican Medical Institute for bioprospecting work in northern Mexico. He also supplied specimens to the American pharmaceutical firms Eli Lilly & Co. and Parke, Davis, & Co., and earned extra income by selling mounted duplicates of his specimens, which he priced at ten cents per sheet, to institutions and individual specialists in the United States and abroad. His notes on the Mexican flora were published in more than 30 articles for the journal Garden and Forest, including a series entitled "Forest Vegetation of Northern Mexico", an invaluable primer for collectors visiting this region. Other botanists, Watson and Davenport among them, contributed articles based entirely on Pringle's Mexican collections. Middlebury College and the University of Vermont recognised Pringle's botanical contributions with honorary MA and DSc degrees, respectively.

At the University of Vermont, special accommodations were built to house Pringle's personal herbarium, which remained under his charge and control during the remainder of his life, and at the time of his death was said to comprise about 155,000 specimens. He was planning a trip to South America when he succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 73, and is reported to have spent his last delirious hours talking of Mexico and his happiness there. Many years earlier, the Mexican Herald had complimented him by referring to him as one of the most brilliant and scholarly men ever to grace Mexico with his presence.

Sources:
H.B. Davis, 1936, The Life and Work of Cyrus Guernsey Pringle
R. Nicholson, "The Splendid Haul of Cyrus Guernsey Pringle", Arnoldia, 61(1): 2-9
H.G. Rugg, 1911, "Cyrus Guernsey Pringle", American Fern Journal, 1(5): 114-115.