4 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY. 



MRS. CORBIN, Lieutenant Maury's daughter and biographer, 

 invokes for her father the reverence of the whole civilized 

 world ; for, she says in her Life, " the best part of his life was de- 

 voted to the performance of services which conferred benefits on 

 the seafaring class of all countries, while the ideas to which he 

 first gave birth have since borne fruit, and are likely to be useful 

 to the whole human race." She adds that " in Maury we have 

 two characteristics, each valuable in itself, but which almost inva- 

 riably produce great results when they are combined. He was 

 endowed with extraordinary powers of application and unflagging 

 industry in working out the driest details. But he also possessed 

 a vivid imagination, so that the dry bones of his new science were 

 endowed with life and interest by the magic touch of his descrip- 

 tive pen. It was Maury who created the science of the physical 

 geography of the sea, and gave that impetus to its study which, 

 in other hands, continues to produce results alike of practical and 

 speculative importance." 



Matthew Fontaine Maury was born in Spottsylvania Coun- 

 ty, Virginia, January 24, 1806, and died in Lexington, Va., Feb- 

 ruary 1, 1873. He was descended on his father's side from two 

 families of Huguenot exiles, already connected by marriage before 

 they left France, who settled in Virginia in 1714. His father was 

 the sixth son of the Rev. James Maury, an Episcopal clergyman 

 and teacher of Albemarle County, Virginia, who numbered among 

 his pupils three boys who afterward became Presidents of the 

 United States, and five signers of the Declaration of Independence. 

 This scholar appears to have been already interested in the great 

 Northwest, and his speculations respecting the Missouri River, the 

 Western mountains, and the rivers beyond them, then hardly 

 known, greatly impressed his pupil Jefferson, who, when he be- 

 came President, secured the dispatch of the expedition of Lewis 

 and Clark. 



When young Matthew was in his fifth year the family removed 

 to Tennessee, near Franklin, where they lived the life of early 

 settlers in a new country. His first ambition to become a mathe- 

 matician was excited by an old cobbler "who used to send the 

 shoes home to his customers with the soles all scratched over with 

 little x's and y's." A fall from a tree in his twelfth year, by which 

 his back was injured, for a time at least seriously, seems to have 

 marked the turning-point of his life. His father, thinking him 

 permanently disabled, yielding to his wish, sent him to Harpeth 

 Academy, of which the Rev. J. H. Otey, afterward Protestant 



