266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



appeared in 1808, with the modest announcement, "To'which are 

 added notes by a professor in this country." While this work was 

 going through the press, a remarkable meteor passed over New Eng- 

 land (December, 1807), and exploded over Weston, Connecticut, where 

 several stones fell to the ground. He visited the scene, and, besides 

 publishing a popular account of the facts in the " Connecticut Herald," 

 made them the subject of a scientific examination and report before 

 the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, which was afterward re- 

 published in the " Memoirs " of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and 

 Sciences, and read aloud in the Philosophical Society.of London, and 

 in the Academy of Sciences in Paris. His two visits to Europe (the 

 second one was in 1851) were followed by books of travels, both of 

 which were received with great satisfaction, while the earlier one 

 (1810) was highly commended, abroad as well as at home, as one of 

 the best works of its class. Pie was the first to obtain potassium in 

 this country, and the first to notice and record the effect of a powerful 

 battery in volatilizing carbon and transferring it from the positive to 

 the negative pole in a state of vajaor. An account of his experiments 

 with the oxyhydrogen blow-pipe was published in the "Memoirs" 

 of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1813. He pub- 

 lished an account of a journey between Hartford and Quebec in 1820, 

 an edition of Bakewell's " Geology " in 1829, and a text-book on chem- 

 istry, in two volumes, in 1880. It was largely through his influence 

 that the Scientific School, started by the younger Professor Silliman in 

 1842, which was afterward endowed by the gentleman whose name it 

 bears as the Sheffield Scientific School, was adopted by the college as 

 one of its departments, in 1846 and 1847. Professor Silliman was for 

 many years in regular correspondence with the most eminent scientific 

 men of Europe, among whom may be named Berzelius, Robert Bake- 

 well, Humboldt, Carl Flitter, Lyell, Sir R. I. Murchison, Richard Owen, 

 Daubeny, Herschel, and Dr. Mantell. Some of these he never knew 

 personally, but was brought into communication with them through a 

 common interest in science. 



