Background
Sereno Watson was born at East Windsor Hill, Connecticut, the tenth of thirteen children of Henry and Julia (Reed) Watson. He was a descendant of Robert Watson, who emigrated to America and had settled in Windsor, Connecticut, by 1639. He was reared on a farm.
Education
In 1847 graduated from Yale College, where he displayed an aptitude for the classics. Shy and reticent, he tried teaching, medicine, banking and insurance, editorial work, and farming, with little success. At forty he entered the Sheffield Scientific School to study chemistry and mineralogy, hoping to fit himself for life in California.
Career
Reaching San Francisco by the Panama route in April 1867, he soon abandoned hope of farming, and set out to find the exploring expedition led by Clarence King and obtain employment in its party, just starting a scientific survey of the Great Basin. King, already annoyed by unpromising applicants for service on this governmental undertaking, was little disposed to favor the middle-aged man, who one July night, dusty and footsore, reached his camp on the Truckee River. However, Watson was permitted to join the party as a volunteer aide, though assigned only menial tasks. Here his varied training, industry, and vigor were much in his favor, and within a month he was receiving a small salary. Soon afterwards, upon the resignation of the botanist of the party, William Whitman Bailey, Watson was commissioned to collect plants and secure data regarding them. Thus, by chance, in his forty-second year he undertook the work in which he was to attain distinction. His collections, which he took to Yale for elaboration, were extensive, well prepared, and accompanied by far more methodical field data than had been taken in earlier governmental surveys. His Botany (1871), usually called "Botany of the King Expedition, " was the fifth volume in the report of the geological survey, a well-illustrated quarto of five hundred pages. In preparing it, Watson was much aided by Daniel Cady Eaton at Yale, John Torrey at Columbia, and Asa Gray at Harvard. Not only enumerating the plants, it embodied so many keys and group-revisions that it became virtually a flora of the Great Basin and contained phytogeographic matter in advance of its time. Rapidly prepared in finished detail and seen through press by 1871, this impressive work, Watson's maiden effort in scientific publication, gave ample proof that he had found his bent. Soon afterwards Watson settled in Cambridge, Massachussets, where in 1873 he became assistant in the Gray Herbarium and the following year its curator, a post he held capably through the rest of his life. Thus settled at Harvard, he undertook the Botany of California. Of this great work, the first volume (1876) was collaborative, W. H. Brewer of Yale aiding on the Polypetalae, and Gray contributing the Gamopetalae. The second and even more difficult volume (1880), covering the rest of the flowering plants, ferns, mosses, and hepatics, was prepared chiefly by Watson. This flora, the earliest for its region, greatly influenced subsequent work on the vegetation of the Pacific Slope. To create a guide to the literature of his subject, he spent long evenings compiling his Bibliographical Index to North American Botany. The only completed volume was published in 1878 by the Smithsonian Institution. Later he undertook the completion of the Manual of the Mosses of North America (1884) begun by Leo Lesquereux and Thomas Potts James, and the continuation of Asa Gray's Synoptical Flora of North America. In 1889, aided by John Merle Coulter, he revised Gray's Manual of Botany, extending its range to the one-hundredth meridian. After the King expedition, he did little field work, though for the forestry records of the Tenth Census he made a hurried journey to the Bitter Root Mountains and some other parts of the Northwest. In 1885 he attempted botanical exploration in Guatemala, but was forced by a tropical fever to abandon the undertaking. He died at Cambridge, of an influenza which caused enlargement of the heart, and was buried by his request in the Harvard Lot at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Membership
He was a member of numerous scientific societies both in America and abroad.
Personality
Watson was of fine appearance and great dignity, a silent man, who worked steadily, calmly, and with remarkable speed. He remained a bachelor and was something of a recluse; yet to those who ventured to turn to him for aid, he was most kind.