He was rather frail, and a young helper in his father's drug store, George F. Markoe, interested the boy in outdoor life.

They collected plants, insects and shore invertebrates and at the age of fifteen he was frequently visiting the Essex Institute, where he became acquainted with A. S. Packard, F. W. Putnam, John Robinson, Caleb Cooke, and others who later became more or less prominent students of natural history.

Of these early drawings, there are many in Packard's Guide and forty quarto plates in Watson and Eaton Botany of the Fortieth Parallel published in 1871.

He had taken to Europe his collection of New England spiders and from Leipzig in December 1875, wrote an article comparing them with those of the European fauna.

Returning, he again engaged in drawing and prepared many of the colored plates in Eaton's Ferns of North America and also many in Packard's Monograph of the Geometridae.

For these models he was awarded a medal with an elaborately engraved certificate at the International Fisheries Congress in London in 1882.

He did much modeling for medical colleges and made drawings for many persons; as Minot's Textbook of Embryology, Verrill's Marine Invertebrates, Scudder's Butterflies of New England, Peckham's papers on spiders, and many for the U. S. Fish Commission.

He began to travel more widely, visiting the West Indies in 1893 with Alexander Agassiz, going with Morse in 1902 to the Southern States, in 1905 to the Californian Mountains, in 1914 to the Canadian Rockies, in 1920 to the Hudson Bay Region.

His method of sifting leaves, moss and detritus brought to light great numbers of the smaller forms.