logwood, opium, scammony, burilla, aloes, sarsaparilla, cinnamon, myrtle wax, the production of saltpetre, cobalt, cochineal, the manufacture of wine, raisins, and olive oil, the collection of gum from the persimmon tree, and the acclimation of silk grass. A medal was given in 1761 to Dr. Jared Eliot, of Connecticut, for the extraction of iron from "black sand."* In 1757 we find their secretary endeavoring to establish branch societies in the colonial cities, especially in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, and Garden seems to have tried to carry out the enterprise in Charleston. After two years he wrote that the society organized had become a mere society of drawing, painting, and sculpture."

"

In a subsequent letter he utters a pitiful plaint. He has often wondered, he says, "that there should be a country abounding with almost every sort of plant, and almost every species of the animal kind, and yet that it should not have pleased God to raise up one botanist.Ӡ

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded by the Legislature of Massachusetts in 1780 and its first volume of memoirs appeared in 1785.

In 1788 an effort was made by the Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire to found in Richmond, Virginia, the "Academy of Arts and Sciences of the United States of America " upon the model of the French Academy. The plan was submitted to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, and received its unqualified endorsement, signed, among others, by Lavoisier. A large subscription was made by the Virginians and a large building erected, but an academy of sciences needs members as well as a president, and the enterprise was soon abandoned.‡

In 1799 was organized the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, which, after publishing one volume of Transactions,

*See DOSSIE: Memoirs of Agriculture. London, vol. i, 1768, pp. 24-6, et seq., also Brock in Richmond Standard, April 26, 1879, p. 4.

+SMITH: op. cit., i, p. 477.

See MORDECAI: Richmond in By-gone Days. A copy of the original pamphlet of proposals is still preserved in the Virginia State Library.

went into a state of inactivity from which it did not arouse itself until 1866.

This sketch would not be complete without some reference also to the history of scientific instruction in America during the last century.

The first regular lectures upon a special natural history topic appear to have been upon comparative anatomy. A course upon this topic was delivered at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1754, by Dr. William Hunter, a native of Scotland, [b. about 1729], a kinsman of the famous English anatomists, William and John Hunter, and a pupil of Munro. His course upon comparative anatomy was given in connection with others upon human anatomy and the history of anatomy, the first medical lectures in America.*

The first instruction in botany was given in Philadelphia in 1768 by Kuhn, who began in May of that year a course of lectures upon that subject in connection with his professorship of Materia Medica and Botany in the College of Philadelphia. Adam Kuhn [b. in Germantown, Pa., 1741, d. 1817] was educated in Europe, and had been a favorite pupil of Linnæus. He did not, however, continue his devotion to natural history, though he became an eminent physician. William Bartram, son of John Bartram, was elected to the same professorship in 1782. In 1788 Prof. Waterhouse, of Harvard College, read lectures upon Natural History to his medical classes, and is said to have subsequently claimed that these were the first public lectures upon natural history given in the United States. This was doubtless an error, for we find that in 1785 a course upon the philosophy of Chemistry and Natural History was delivered in Philadelphia. "People of every description, men and women, flock to these lectures," "They are held at the University three

writes a contemporary.

evenings in a week."+

*One of the original tickets to these courses is in the Library of the Surgeon-General's office in Washington.

+ DARLINGTON, p. 535.

The first professor of chemistry was Dr. Benjamin Rush, who lectured in the Philadelphia Medical School as early as 1769. Bishop Madison was professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at William and Mary College, from 1774 to 1777; Aaron Dexter, of chemistry and materia medica at Harvard, 1783 to 1816; John Maclean, at Princeton, 1795-1812, being the first to occupy a separate chair of chemistry. Before the days of chemical professorships, the professor of mathematics seems to have been the chief exponent of science in our institutions of learning.

John Winthrop, [b. 1714, d. 1779], for instance, who was Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard from 1738 to 1779, was a prominent Fellow of the Royal Society, to whose Transactions he communicated many important papers, chiefly astronomical. We read, however, that Count Rumford imbibed from his lectures his love for physical and chemical research, and from this it may be inferred that he taught as much of chemistry as was known in his day. William Small, professor of mathematics in William and Mary from 1758 to 1762, was a man of similar tastes, though less eminent. He was the intimate friend of Erasmus Darwin. President Jefferson was his pupil, attended his lectures on natural philosophy, and got from time to time his first views of the expansion of science and of the system of things in which we are placed."

Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill [b. 1764, d. 1831] was the first man to hold a professorship of natural history, lecturing upon that subject, together with chemistry, in Columbia College in 1792. Dr. Mitchill was eminent as a zoologist, mineralogist, and chemist, and not only published many valuable papers but in 1798 established the first American scientific journal.

Harvard appears to have had the first separate professorship of natural history, which was filled by William Dandridge Peck, a zoologist and botanist of prominence in his day.

A professorship of botany was established in Columbia College, N. Y., as early as 1795, at which time Dr. David Hosack [b. in

New York, 1769, d. 1835] was the incumbent. Dr. Hosack brought with him from Europe in 1790 the first cabinet of minerals ever seen in the United States. In its arrangement he was assisted by one of his pupils, Archibald Bruce, who became, in 1806, Professor of Mineralogy, and who, soon after, in 1810, established the American Journal of Mineralogy.

Dr. Hosack was the founder of the first public botanic gardenthis was in New York in 1801; another was founded in Charleston in 1804. These had disappeared forty years ago, and the one at Cambridge, established in 1808, is the only one now in exist

ence.

The first public museum was that founded in Philadelphia, in 1785, by Charles Wilson Peale; the bones of a mammoth and a stuffed paddle-fish forming its nucleus. This establishment had a useful career of nearly fifty years.

VII.

We have now rehearsed the story of the earliest investigators of American natural history, including two centuries of English endeavor, and nearly three if we take into consideration the earlier explorations of the naturalists of continental Europe.

We have seen how, in the course of many generations, the intellectual supremacy of the Western Continent went from the Spaniards and the French and the Dutch to the new people who were to be called Americans, and we have become acquainted with the men who were most thoroughly identified with the scientific endeavors of each successive period of activity.

The achievements of American science during the century which has elapsed since the time when Franklin, Jefferson, Rittenhouse, and Rumford were its chief exponents have been often the subject of presidential addresses like this, and the record is a proud one. During the last fifty years in England, and the last forty in America, discovery has followed discovery with such rapid succession that it is somewhat hard to realize that

American science in the colonial period, or even that of Europe at the same time, had any features which are worthy of consideration.

The naturalists whose names I have mentioned were the intellectual ancestors of the naturalists of to-day. Upon the foundations which they laid the superstructure of modern natural history is supported. Without the encyclopædists and explorers there could have been no Ray, no Klein, no Linnæus. Without the systematists of the latter part of the eighteenth century the school of comparative anatomists would never have arisen. Had Cuvier and his disciples never lived there would have been no place for the philosophic biologists of to-day.

The spirit of the early naturalists may be tested by passages in their writings which show how well aware they were of the imperfections of their work. Listen to what John Lawson, the Carolina naturalist, wrote in the year 1700:

"The reptiles or smaller insects are too numerous to relate here, this country affording innumerable quantities thereof; as the flying stags with horns, beetles, butterflies, grasshoppers, locust, and several hundreds of uncouth shapes, which in the summer season are discovered here in Carolina, the description of which requires a large volume, which is not my intent at present, besides, what the mountainous part of this land may hereafter open to our view, time and industry will discover, for we that have settled but a small share of this large province cannot imagine, but there will be a great number of discoveries made by those that shall come hereafter into the back part of this land, and make enquiries therein, when, at least, we consider that the westward of Carolina is quite different in soil, air, weather, growth of vegetables, and several animals, too, which we at present are wholly strangers to, and seek for. As to a right knowledge thereof, I say, when another age is come, the ingenious then in being may stand upon the shoulders of those that went before them, adding their own experiments to what was delivered down to them by their predecessors, and then there will be something towards a complete natural history, which, in these days, would be no easy undertaking to any author that writes truly and compendiously as he ought to do."

Herbert Spencer, in his essay on "The Genesis of Science,"