Lucien Marcus Underwood was born on October 26, 1853, in New Woodstock, Madison, New York.

He was an American botanist, mycologist, and educator. He graduated from Syracuse University (M.Sc., 1878; Ph.D., 1879). In the 1880s and 1890s, Underwood taught geology, botany, biology, and natural science at several colleges and universities, e.g., Illinois Wesleyan University, Syracuse University (1883; 1887-1890), De Pauw University (1890-1895), Auburn University, and Columbia University (1896-1907). In 1892, Underwood served on the Committee on Nomenclature of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He joined the staff of the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in 1896. He participated in botanical expeditions to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Rocky Mountains and was elected to the NYBG Board of Scientific Directors and served as its chairman (1901-1907). He contributed a section on Pteridophyta to the Britton & Brown Illustrated Flora, was editor of the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club and assisted in the founding of the Botanical Society of America. Underwood published numerous papers in botanical journals and was the author of “Our Native Ferns and How to Study Them” (1881) and “Descriptive Catalogue of North American Hepaticae” (1884).

In 1881, he married Marie Annette Spurr (1854–). After losing large amounts of money on Wall Street, he committed suicide on November 16, 1907, in Redding, Fairfield, Connecticut.

Edward Umfreville was born around 1755 and nothing else is known about his life prior to 1771, when he began his work as a writer for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He worked in Fort Severn Ontario in 1772 and 1773, and in 1775, was transferred back to York Factory where he became second in command until 1782 when the fort was captured by the French, led by Jean-François de Galaup. The personell and the staff of the fort were sent back to France as prisoners. Umfreville was freed by the Treaty of Paris and travelled to London in 1783. Disputes between him and the Hudson’s Bay Company ended his tenure, however, he returned to Quebec in 1784 and was employed by the North West Company, to search for an alternate route from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg. In 1788, Umfreville quit working with the North West Company and tried to join the Hudson’s Bay Company again, though unsuccessful. Umfreville was widely critical of the company in his book titled The Present State of Hudson’s Bay that he wrote in 1790.