UNDERWOOD, Francis Henry, author, born in Enfield, Massachusetts, 12 January, 1825. He was educated partly at Amherst, then taught in Kentucky, read law, and was admitted to the bar. He returned to Massachusetts in 1850, and thenceforward took an active part in the anti-slavery cause. He was clerk of the Massachusetts senate in 1852, and afterward literary adviser of the publishing-house of Phillips, Sampson, and Co. He conceived the idea of uniting the literary force of the north to the Free-soil movement by means of a magazine, and after several years of effort was the means of securing the eminent writers that made the fame of the "Atlantic Monthly." He assisted in the management of that magazine for two years, until the firm with which he was connected came to an end. He was then (1859) elected clerk of the superior court in Boston, which post he held for eleven years, when he resigned and entered private business, chiefly to obtain more leisure for literary work. His studies have been mainly in English literature, but his writings cover a wide field. He served for thirteen years in the school board of Boston. In 1885 he was appointed United States consul at Glasgow, Scotland. His lectures on "American Men of Letters" and his occasional speeches, such as that before the Glasgow Ayrshire society " On the Memory of Burns," have been much admired. In 1888 the University of Glasgow conferred on him the degree of LL. D. His works include a " Hand-Book of English Literature" (Boston, 1871) ; "Hand-Book of American Literature" (1872); "Cloud Pictures," a series of imaginative stories, chiefly musical (1872); "Lord of Himself," a novel of old times in Kentucky (1874) ; " Man Proposes," a novel (1880); "The True Story of Exodus," an abridgment of the work by Brugsch-Bey (1880); and biographical sketches of Longfellow (1882), Lowell (1882), and Whittier (1883). Dr. Underwood is engaged upon an elaborate popular history of English literature.--His second cousin, Lucius Marcus, botanist, born in New Woodstock, New York, 26 October, t853, was graduated at the Syracuse university, New York, in 1877, and was professor of botany and geology in Illinois Wesleyan university in 1880-'3. Since 1883 he has held the chair of botany in Syracuse university. He is engaged in the study of the ferns and hepaticae of North America, , and in addition to numerous articles in scientific journals he has published "Systematic Plant Record" (Syracuse, 1881); "Our Native Ferns, and how to study Them " (Bloomington, II1., 1881) ; "Our Native Ferns and their Allies" (1882 ; 3d ed., New York, 1888) ; and "Descriptive Catalogue of North American Hepaticae" (1884). He is now preparing an Underwood Genealogy."