OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: MAY 30, 1865. Oll 



wrought these results. The kindness and sympathy with which he 

 was accustomed to counsel and help his students he extended to all 

 who were laboring to advance knowledge, cheering them in their stud- 

 ies and in their efforts at original investigation with a generous ap- 

 preciation no less honorable to him than it was helpful to the rising 

 science of the country. 



In estimating Pi'ofessor Silliman's services as a teacher of science, 

 we should remember that he began his labors when Chemistry was in 

 its infancy, and Geology was but emerging from a chaos of conjectu- 

 ral cosmogonies. AVhen he entered upon his task, he was unprovided 

 with apparatus or specimens, " with scarcely a retort, and only minerals 

 enough to fill a candle-box." 



With the intrepidity of a pioneer he set himself to his work, and 

 such was his success in it, that, at the close of the fifty years of almost 

 unbroken service as a college professor, he could not only point to a 

 long array of chemists and geologists whom either directly or indii'ect- 

 ly he had helped to train, but to superb collections of minerals and fos- 

 sils and other materials of instruction gathered for his College mainly 

 through the influence of his enthusiasm and personal popularity. 



The characteristics which marked his college lectures were even 

 more conspicuously shown when Professor Silliman was called on to 

 discourse on scientific subjects before a general audience. His bril- 

 liant experiments and other illustrations, and the rhetorical attractions 

 of his style, made him one of the most welcome of popular lecturers on 

 Chemistry and Geology, and secured him a large attendance on the 

 courses of lectures which he gave in many of the principal towns of the 

 United States, from Boston as far west and south as St. Louis, New 

 Orleans, and Mobile. 



Important as were Professor Silliman's services as a college teacher 

 and officer and as a popular lecturer, his strongest claim to the gratitude 

 of men of science, especially in this country, rests upon the establish- 

 ment and the maintenance, often under very discouraging circumstan- 

 ces, of the American Journal of Science, better known both in Europe 

 and this country as Silliman's Journal, with which his name contin- 

 ued to be connected until his death, and of which for twenty years he 

 was sole, and for eight years more senior editor. 



Founded in 1818 as a quarterly, but for many years past pubhshed 

 as a bi-monthly periodical, this journal has for a period of forty-seven 

 years been the leading exponent of the investigations and discoveries 



