Albert LeRoy Andrews

Albert LeRoy Andrews (1878–1961) was a professor of Germanic philology and an avocational bryologist, known as "one of the world’s foremost bryologists and the American authority on Sphagnaceae." From 1922 to 1923 he was the president of the Sullivant Moss Society, renamed in 1970 the American Bryological and Lichenological Society.

Education and career After graduating from secondary school in Williamstown, Andrews matriculated at Williams College. There he was a member of varsity teams in baseball and American football and in 1899 received a bachelor's degree with a major in languages, although he was extremely interested in botany. At Williams College, he published a list of mosses and hepatics of the northwest corner of Massachusetts in the Mount Greylock region. In 1902 he received a master's degree from Williams College for work done in absentia. At Harvard University he was a graduate student from 1902 to 1903 and became interested in the philology of the Germanic languages and how they are related to other Indo-European languages. After graduating in 1903 from Harvard with his M.A. degree, Andrews was an instructor in German from 1903 to 1904 at the University of West Virginia and from 1904 to 1905 at Dartmouth College. He then went to Europe and studied from 1905 to 1908 at universities in Berlin, Kiel, Copenhagen, and Oslo and received his doctorate in 1908 from the University of Kiel. and in 1931 a professor of Germanic philology, retiring as professor emeritus in 1946. He was chair of Cornell's German department from 1924 to 1928. His botanical correspondents include Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Hendley Barnhart, Hugo Leander Blomquist, Elizabeth Gertrude Britton, Nathaniel Lord Britton, Henry Shoemaker Conard, Howard Alvin Crum, Elias Durand, Alexander William Evans, William Gilson Farlow, Roxana Stinchfield Ferris, Abel Joel Grout, Olaf Hagerup, Elva Lawton, Leopold Loeske, William Ralph Maxon, Charles Frederick Millspaugh, Conrad Vernon Morton, Philip A. Munz, Harold Norman Moldenke, Geneva Sayre, Aaron John Sharp, Alexander Skutch, William Campbell Steere, Roland Thaxter, Winona H. Welch, and many others.

His treatise on The Bryophyte Flora of the Upper Cayuga Lake Basin, New York (Cornell Univ. Agr. Exper. Sta. Memoir 352, publ. Dec. 1957) has become a classic. wrote in 2010:

Andrews contributed definitive treatments of the families Bryaceae and Mniaceae (both in volume 2) for the 3-volume work Moss Flora of North America North of Mexico edited by Abel Joel Grout.

As a philologist Andrews contributed major articles on the Old Norse sagas Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks and Hrómundar saga Gripssonar and a series on the relationship of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to the writings of Christian Molbech and others. Andrews married Olga Sophie Wunderli, and they had several children.