Arthur Bliss Seymour (January 3, 1859 – March 29, 1933) was an American botanist and mycologist who specialized in parasitic fungi.
Before the age of five he caught scarlet fever, which left him with permanent hearing loss.
While working on his degree, he researched under the tutelage of Thomas J. Burrill, assisting in his study of the parasitic fungi of Illinois.
[2] Seymour spent his first two years following graduation at the Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History which was spent surveying and indexing rusts from Illinois, during which he discovered new rust species.
[1] It was at this time when he met Franklin Sumner Earle, whom he collaborated with over the course of his career.
He then relocated to Harvard University working as an assistant to William Gilson Farlow from 1883 until 1885, including a period they spent at Cambridge.
During this time he also assisted Burrill and Earle on several mycological field collections.
He spent the next year at the University of Wisconsin teaching general botany courses.
[3] He also received his Masters of Science degree from Illinois University and returned to pursue what has been described as his life’s work at the Harvard Cryptogamic Herbarium.
Again working with Farlow, he began organizing and detailing the collection from its early stages into the time it became internationally renowned.
He also spent a significant amount of his time cataloging American mycological references when the field was in a state of rapid growth.
He and Franklin Sumner Earle released the exsiccata Economic Fungi, which illustrated horticultural and weedy plants infected with fungi for easier diagnoses, and totalled eleven fascicles between 1890 and 1899.
[4][5] Between 1892 and 1903 he was co-editor of three other exsiccata works called Decades of North American lichens with Clara Eaton Cummings and Thomas Albert Williams.
[6] He also had a passion for natural science education, donating specimens and service to both schools and universities.
He continued working on the Harvard Mycological Indexes until shortly before his death.
On March 29, 1933, he succumbed to heart complications after several weeks of illness in Waverley, Massachusetts.
A subject classification for botanical literature arranged after the Dewey system for the A.A.A.S.
Books 1888-1891 (With Farlow WG) A Provisional Host Index of the Fungi of the United States.
A series of specimens designed chiefly to illustrate the fungus diseases of useful and noxious plants.