EBEN NORTON HORSFORD. 3 i I 



Mrs. Wilson was a remarkable woman, and did much toward building 

 up Ills character on the broad foundations laid by his mother. 



From the Livingston County School he went to the Rensselaer 

 Polytechnic Institute of Troy. New York, from which he graduated as 

 a civil engineer in LS37. While studying at the Rensselaer Institute 

 he spent his vacations in earning money toward his support, at first 

 by teaching at Leroy, and later by work on the surveys lor the New 

 York and Erie, and the Rochester and Auburn Railroads. 



After his graduation he obtained for a time congenial employraeni 

 on the Geological Survey of the State of New York, under Professor 

 James Hall, and in 1840 was appointed Professor of Mathematics and 

 Natural Sciences in the Albany Female Academy, a position which 

 he held for four years. During this time he took up the study 

 of Daguerre's photographic process with Morse, the inventor of the 

 telegraph, and this work attracted the attention of the scientific world 

 to him, and led to his delivering a course of lectures on chemistry at 

 Newark College in Delaware in 1843, and another in 1844, after he 

 had left the Albany Academy. This period at Albany was of greal 

 importance in the formation of his character; Hall and Morse fostered 

 his taste for scientific research and impressed upon him careful and 

 accurate methods of work; the Reverend Dr. William Sprague bad 

 a strong influence on his general development; and at the. Female 

 Acadeniv he met Mary L'Hommedieu Gardiner, who afterward (in 

 1847) became his wife. 



So far as his future was concerned, the most important resull of 

 his growing reputation was an invitation from Professor ^ ebster to 

 visit him in Cambridge, when he urged Horsford to go abroad and 

 study, — advice which was followed in December, 1844. Arrived in 

 Germany he turned hid steps toward Giessen, at that time the goal 

 of all chemical students, where Liebig had recently introduced the 

 modern method of teaching chemistry in the laboratory. Here he 

 spent two happy profitable years in the society of such men as Hof- 

 mann (whose desk was next his), Williamson. Fresenius, Will, ami 

 many others who afterward became famous in the Bcience, — a chemi- 

 cal family over which Liebig exercised a fatherly care. At the end 

 of this time Liebig, with whom he was a great favorite, urged him to 

 take the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. This he refused to do, 

 because he was living on borrowed money, and thought it not right 

 to involve himself further in debt, even l.y the slight amount of the 

 fee for the decree. Liebig induced the University to offer to remit 

 the fee, a great honor when the tenacity with which Universities 



