OF ARTS AXD SCIENCES: MAY 26, 1863. 131 



Nathan Hale, another of the oldest members of the same sec- 

 tion, having been a Fellow of the Academy for forty-four years, 

 died on the 8th of February of the current year. 



He was born in Westhampton, Massachusetts, on the 16th of 

 August, 1784, was graduated at Williams College in 1784, studied 

 law at Troy, New York, was a teacher of mathematics at Phillips 

 Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and settled in Boston in 1810, 

 where he soon became a member of the Suffolk bar. On the first of 

 March, 1814, he became the editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser, 

 the earliest daily paper in this city ; and he retained his connection 

 with it for more than forty years. He was the first to introduce an 

 editorial department as an essential part of a public journal ; and by 

 the justice, thoroughness, and sagacious prudence with which he 

 managed this department, by the fairness of his criticisms, and by 

 the discrimination and pure taste of his selections, he not only secured 

 the confidence of the community, but did much to elevate the charac- 

 ter of journalism. A journal more entirely reliable than Mr. Hale's 

 was not to be found. Those who have regularly read what has ap- 

 peared in its columns have seldom missed any event of public im- 

 portance which has occurred in either hemisphere ; and any one who 

 should now wish to get a clear, condensed, honest, and unprejudiced 

 view of the civil, social, and literary history of the last half-century 

 would be rewarded for the labor of examining the columns of the 

 Daily Advertiser. Although his unceasing duties as editor, and in 

 the public and private offices he filled, left little time for original inves- 

 tigation, and he may have done nothing for the advancement of science 

 directly, he did what was not less honorable nor less deserving of 

 respectful remembrance, by constantly availing himself of the re- 

 sources of science, with which he kept himself familiar, for the 

 advancement of the useful arts. He was the first in this State to 

 apply the power-press to newspaper printing. He made from original 

 sources a valuable map of New England, and an excellent manual of 

 geography, illustrated by maps printed with common types. More 

 than all, he took a leading part in the establishment of the railway 

 system in New England, and in the introduction of pure water into 

 Boston. Associated as he was, in these important works, with men of 

 greater knowledge and skill as engineers, and more full of original 

 suggestions, he still did as much as any one else to advance these ob- 

 jects, by his perseverance and devotion, by the enlarged views he was 



