REPORT OF THE COUNCIL; 



MAY 23, 1888. 



Since the last Annual Meeting, on May 24, 1887, the 

 Academy has received notice of the death of fifteen of its 

 members ; — viz. seven Resident Fellows, Alvan Clark, 

 Charles S. Bradley, John Dean, Asa Gray, Laurens P. 

 Hickock, Mark Hopkins, Charles E. Ware; three Associate 

 Fellows, S. F. Baird, S. G. Brown, and E. B. Elliott; and 

 five Foreign Honorary Members, Matthew Arnold, Henry 

 Sumner Maine, H. A. J. Munro, Gustav Kirchhoff, and 

 Balfour Stewart. 



RESIDENT FELLOWS. 



ALVAN CLARK. 



Alvan Clark was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts, on March 8, 

 1804. The unusual capacity for delicate manipulation which subse- 

 quently established his reputation as an optician first displayed itself in 

 a taste for painting. His youth was passed in labor on the farm of his 

 father, but before he was twenty-two he had acquired much skill in his 

 favorite art. Circumstances required him to make a practical use of 

 this skill, for the New England of 1826 could offer little encourage- 

 ment to aesthetic pursuits, and Mr. Clark exchanged farming for en- 

 graving the rolls used for printing calico in a manufactory at Lowell. 

 But in 1835 he ventured to establish himself in Boston as a portrait 

 painter, and pursued that business for the next twenty years, his resi- 

 dence being in Cambridge. He had married while living at Lowell, 



* A notice of Elliott could not be prepared for this volume ; but notices of 

 Curtius, Eichler, and Studer, necessarily omitted last year, are now given. 



