840 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



instance, the variolous or tubercular germ, may be difficult to trace, 

 for as we at present see these germs it is as though we were looking at 

 a picture or photograph of a family tree in which the greater part of 

 the trunk and larger branches have become obliterated, having only 

 the terminal twigs visible, with no apparent connection between them. 

 Lancet. 







SKETCH OF PROFESSOR H. A. NEWTON. 



THE President of the American Association for this year, Professor 

 Hubebt Anson Newton, of Yale College, is distinguished not 

 less for his researches in the higher mathematics, which mark a distinct 

 advance in the American study of that science, than by his .contribu- 

 tions to the determination of the orbit of the November meteors, in 

 which he was a pioneer. 



Professor Newton was born at Sherburne, New York, on the 19th 

 of March, 1830. Having made his preparatory and academical studies 

 in the schools of his native town, he entered Yale College in the sec- 

 ond term of his Freshman year, and was graduated from that institu- 

 tion in 1850. He then spent two years and a half in studying mathe- 

 matics at home and in New Haven, and was appointed tutor in the 

 college in July, 1852. Entering this office in June, 1853, he had the 

 care of the whole department of mathematics from the first ; for Pro- 

 fessor Stanley was ill, and died in the spring of 1853. He was elected 

 Professor of Mathematics in 1855, and was given permission to spend 

 a year in Europe. Returning, he assumed the chair in 1856, and has 

 ever since been engaged in the active discharge of the duties of the 

 professorship. 



His earlier works appear to have been principally directed to those 

 methods in higher geometry, the power and elegance of which, says 

 his biographer in the " History of Yale College," have been so highly 

 shown in the works of Chasles and others. Among the most conspicu- 

 ous of them is a memoir " On the Construction of Certain Curves by 

 Points," published in 1861 in the "Mathematical Monthly," which is 

 characterized as one of those contributions to abstract science which 

 have been, unfortunately, too rare in this country. A later, no less 

 remarkable paper was one of joint authorship in the Transactions of 

 the Connecticut Academy of Sciences on "Certain Transcendental 

 Curves." 



His most important service to science, and the one by which he is 

 probably most widely known to the world of students, is the work 

 which he performed in the study of the November meteors. These 

 phenomena, which had been occasionally mentioned at previous periods 

 of their recurrence without apparently any adequate comprehension of 



