Edward O. Wilson has described Dr. Gideon Lincecum as "an American original, expansive passionate, and prone to make science out of what he could see with his own eyes. His life illuminates an important era, and mood, in Texas history, and he ranks as one of America's major pioneering naturalists." A most remarkable man who found himself ill at ease in "polite and fashionable society," Lincecum preferred to keep company with "kindred forms, my brother emmets and my sister worms," observing and studying nature on the nineteenth-century Texas frontier. With almost no formal education, he...

Edward O. Wilson has described Dr. Gideon Lincecum as "an American original, expansive passionate, and prone to make science out of what he could see with his own eyes. His life illuminates an important era, and mood, in Texas history, and he ranks as one of America's major pioneering naturalists." A most remarkable man who found himself ill at ease in "polite and fashionable society," Lincecum preferred to keep company with "kindred forms, my brother emmets and my sister worms," observing and studying nature on the nineteenth-century Texas frontier. With almost no formal education, he...

The effects of the Civil War on civilian life in Texas are powerfully conveyed in the correspondence of Dr. Gideon Lincecum (17931874), a natural scientist and philosopher who moved to Texas in 1848 with his family of ten children and settled in Washington County. Having retired from an extensive and lucrative botanical medical practice in Mississippi, Gideon devoted much of his time in Texas before the war to studying the natural sciences and carrying on an extensive correspondence that included Northern scientists and even Charles Darwin. He used a letterpress to make copies of almost all...