We were pained to learn on the return of the Editor from the West, of the death of Dr. John A. Warder, which occurred at his beautiful home at North Bend on the 15th of August. He was in his seventy-second year; but so great was his sprightly cheerfulness on all occasions that few would have taken him for one of so great an age.

Few men in the East have done more to awaken an interest in horticulture than Dr. Warder, and in in the West no one has probably done as much as he. He was a Pennsylvanian by birth, and connected by marriage with the well known families of Cope and Haines, which have done so much for the intellectual reputation of Philadelphia, especially in connection with the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences of which Dr. Warder remained a member to the day of his death. He went West early after marriage, and practiced medicine with great success, abandoning it for rural life at North Bend, above Cincinnati, in 1855. In a literary way the writer's first acquaintance with him was when he undertook the editorship of the Western Horticultural Review, which appeared about the same time with Downing's Horticulturist. There seemed no room for another purely horticultural magazine at that time, and Dr. Warder's venture was comparatively short lived, but it had a wonderful influence on the horticulture of Cincinnati; and at that time, in connection with the Cincinnati Horticultural Society which Dr. Warder did so much to sustain, Cincinnati became with the Boston and Philadelphia Societies among the great leaders of horticulture in the United States. The wide spread progress made in strawberry culture during the past quarter of a century owes much to Dr. Warder in the Horticultural Review, and the Cincinnati Horticultural Society. In 1858 his work on hedges appeared, which is still the chief reference book on this subject.

In 1867 Warder's Pomology came out covering however apples only. It is the nearest attempt to place the descriptions of fruit on a scientific basis that has ever been made. The limit of characters was too narrow. There was not enough allowance made for possible variations from climate or soil. In our mind it always seemed a wonder the Doctor did not go on and perfect his method. It will always stand as the best advance ever made by a single author on scientific pomology. As a botanist as well as an author he has done valuable service. He was the first to show that there were really two species of Catalpa in this country, and to suggest for the Western form the name of C. speciosa, eventually adopted by Dr. Engelmann the describer of the species. Whatever good may come from the recognition of the arboreal merits of the Catalpa, will be mainly the work of Dr. Warder.

In brief there is scarcely an agricultural, horticultural, forestry, pomological or scientific society in the United States which will not directly or indirectly miss Dr. Warder, and his name will long stand prominent in the annals of American intellectual progress.