Arthur Stanley Pease was a classical scholar who was also an avid amateur botanist. Born in 1881, he received his AB, AM and PhD degrees in classics from Harvard in 1902, 1903 and 1905 respectively. He taught classics at Harvard from 1906-1909, at the University of Illinois from 1909-1924, and at Amherst College from 1924-1927. In 1927 he was appointed president of Amherst College. He resigned five years later and returned to teaching classics at Harvard, from 1932 to 1905.

Pease was an outstanding amateur field botanist and accompanied Merritt Lyndon Fernald on a number of his botanical expeditions, including 1904 to the GaspJ, 1920 to Nova Scotia, 1923 and 1933 to Mount Logan, and 1925 to northern Newfoundland. Pease's love of mountaineering led him to study the flora of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He published Vascular flora of Co`s County, New Hampshire in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History in 1924. He prepared a revised edition of this flora toward the end of his life, which was published by the New England Botanic Club under the title A flora of northern New Hampshire in 1964. He collaborated with Richard Evans Schultes on Generic Names of Orchids: their origin and meaning, published in 1963. Pease also published a number of botanical articles. All of these botanical works were in addition to his considerable publications on classical languages and literatures. He also published a book of reminiscences, Sequestered vales of life (1946), which includes anecdotes of his collecting trips. In 1912, Pease gave his herbarium of 12,000 sheets to the Gray Herbarium and the New England Botanic Club,a nd he continued to make regular gifts thereafter.

Pease married Henrietta Faxon in 1909, and they had one daughter, Henrietta.

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