Andrew Jackson Howe, A. B., M. D. Andrew Jackson Howe was born in Paxton, Massachusetts, April fourteenth, eighteen hundred and twenty-five. He died in Cincinnati, Ohio, January 16, 1892. Himself distinguished, he came of a conspicuous ancestral line, honored in early American annals. His parents were Samuel H. Howe and Elizabeth Hubbard (Moore) Howe. With the earliest history of the towns of Watertown, Sudbury, and Marlboro is linked the name of Howe. According to a writer in the Worcester Magazine, one of the earliest printed records of New England, and quoted by Professor John Uri Lloyd in a sketch of Dr. Howe, is the tradition that "John Howe, of Watertown, came from the parish of Hodnel, in Warwickshire, England, and that he was connected with the family of Sir Charles Howe, of Lancaster, in the reign of Charles I." The John Howe referred to subsequently lived in Sudbury, and his name appears in the petition for the grant of Marlboro in 1657. Thus Dr. Howe's paternal ancestor was prominent in the settling of New England within forty years after the memorable landing of the Mayflower. Watertown was near Boston, and from there many, striking out to found other towns in the wilderness fringe of our eastern seaboard, became the pioneers of statecraft from whence our great nation has evolved. To the privations and toils of the home-builders on the rugged and inclement shores of Nova Angliæ do we owe the building of our great commonwealth, and Dr. Howe was fortunate indeed to have descended from one who was an active participant in the evolution of this great gift to posterity. In 1743, a grandson of this same John Howe bought a tract of land farther inland and built a home in which Andrew J. Howe was born, and in the bosom of the sacred soil of this purchase all that is mortal of the great surgeon now reposes. Not only is the name of John Howe's line treasured in the early history of New England, but it has found an abiding place in the classics of American literature, for the poet Longfellow, in his delightful "Tales of a Wayside Inn," has immortalized the famed colonial hostelry-the "Red Cross Inn," kept by another grandson of John Howe of Marlboro. The poetic record reads: "Proud was he of his name and race, Of old Sir William and Sir Hugh, And in the parlor, full in view, His coat of arms, well framed and glazed, * Upon a helmet barred; below The scroll reads, " By the name of Howe," Though glimmering with a latent light, Down there at Concord in the fight." IN PREPARATION.-The boyhood life of the subject of our sketch was much like that of the average country boy favored by the diversified environment of hill and valley, forest and stream, and the quaint old roads and by-paths of the New England country. Born with an unbounded love for nature, his naturalist spirit fairly revelled in the beauties of landscape and sky, the advantages for observation, and in the sports of the season-sports ancient and more satisfying, perhaps, in the older settlements than can ever come into our faster and more artificial life of to-day. To young Howe were known the haunts and habits of the birds, fishes, and fur-bearing creatures, and so well did he observe them that in height of his career as a teacher and surgeon he recalled these most useful and vivid assets, and they went far toward making of him one of the most gifted comparative anatomists of his time. While yet a small boy, Dr. Howe's father removed from the farm at Paxton to the neighboring village of Leicester. Here the preliminary schooling was obtained, under several different in |