262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by the author fifty-two years afterward suggested very few alterations 

 and disclosed no important errors. The cabinet of Mr. Benjamin D. 

 Perkins was shortly afterward purchased for a thousand dollars, and 

 in 1810 the splendid cabinet of Colonel George Gibbs was deposited 

 in the college. The latter cabinet, which attracted visitors from all 

 parts of the country, was bought fifteen years afterward. While 

 Professor Silliman was engaged in arranging it, the Rev. Dr. Ely ac- 

 costed him : " Why, dominie, is there not danger that with these phys- 

 ical attractions you will overtop the Latin and the Greek ? " Professor 

 Silliman replied : " Sir, let the literary gentlemen push and sustain 

 their departments. It is my duty to give full effect to the sciences 

 committed to my care." 



An " American Journal of Mineralogy " had been started by Dr. 

 Archibald Bruce, of New York, in 1810, but had been suspended after 

 the publication of four numbers. Professor Silliman, at the suggestion 

 of Colonel Gibbs, and with the approbation of Dr. Bruce, started, in 

 1818, a journal intended to include the entire circle of the physical 

 sciences and their applications. This was ' Silliman's " (now the 

 "American ") "Journal of Science," which is still continued under the 

 direction of the son and son-in-law of its founder. 



The courses of popular lectures on scientific subjects which were 

 conducted by Professor Silliman in the different cities of the United 

 States, originated in 1808, when a course in chemistry for ladies and 

 gentlemen was proposed to him, and gladly assented to, as a scheme 

 in the interest of scientific progress. A class of about forty-five per- 

 sons was formed, and listened to the instruction given them apparently 

 with complete satisfaction, for it appeared afterward, the lecturer re- 

 marks, in speaking of the matter, that the course " turned on female 

 hinges," and " sentiment lubricated the joints. ... It was my province 

 to explain the affinities of matter, and I had not advanced far in my 

 pleasing duties before I discovered that moral affinities, also moving 

 without my intervention, were playing an important part." One of 

 the affinities involved the professor, and his marriage to Miss Harriet 

 Trumbull, daughter of the second Governor Trumbull, and one of his 

 hearers, followed in the course of the next year. Many years after- 

 ward he was invited to deliver a course in Hartford the first out of 

 New Haven; then followed courses in Lowell, Boston (where "the 

 Orthodox and Unitarian influence was united in his favor," and where 

 he returned to lecture in several successive years afterward), other 

 New England towns, and New York. In 1843 he lectured in Pitts- 

 burg, where he received most "vivid demonstrations of kind and 

 gratified feelings" ; the next year in Baltimore, where he found that 

 " people who came for once, staid " ; and afterward in Baltimore 

 again, Mobile, New Orleans, Natchez, at Washington before the 

 .Smithsonian Institution, and in St. Louis. The calls to lecture con- 

 tinued actively through twenty-three years, from 1834 to 1857. In 



