BENJAMIN OSGOOD PEIRCE. 851 



ing the generations that follow. The son of Robert was Benjamin, 

 and the son of Benjamin was Jerathmiel, and the son of Jerathmiel 

 was Benjamin, 2d, who fell at Lexington, and his son was Benjamin, 3d, 

 whose son Avas Benjamin Osgood, 1st, the father of our friend. 



From Jerathmiel, potent name, were descended also Jerathmiel, 2d, 

 and his son Benjamin, Librarian of Harvard College from 1820 to 

 1831, and his son Benjamin, Tutor or Professor of Mathematics at 

 Harvard from 1831 to 1880, among whose sons were James Mills, 

 also Professor of Mathematics at Harvard; and Charles Sanders, 

 projector of the philosophic cult of Pragmatism. In the annals of 

 intellectual achievement in America there is no greater name than 

 Peirce. 



The father of our colleague was a graduate of Waterville College 

 in ]Maine. He married, in 1841, Miss IMehetable Osgood Seccomb, 

 a native of Salem, whom he had met for the first time in Georgia, where 

 both were engaged in teaching. After his marriage IMr. Peirce re- 

 mained for several years in the South as Professor of Chemistry and 

 Natural Philosophy at Mercer. Returning to Massachusetts in 1849, 

 he engaged in the South African trade, and in 1864 he visited the Cape 

 of Good Hope, taking his son with him. 



\Yhen the son was sixteen years of age and a graduate of the Beverly 

 High School, he developed an indisposition to study, a phenomenon 

 which must have seemed a portent in his household. He was accord- 

 ingly apprenticed to learn carpentry, and he worked for two years at 

 this trade, an experience which was doubtless to his advantage in 

 various ways. 



The boy having proved a faithful apprentice received in 1872 per- 

 mission to go to Harvard. He devoted himself to his studies with 

 great zeal for the next two or three months in preparation for the Col- 

 lege examinations, which he took all at one time in September, 1872, 

 and he was then admitted to Harvard, with a condition, it is said, in 

 some particular of elementary mathematics. He did not have a college 

 room, but lived with his family in a rather distant part of Cambridge, 

 whence he ran a telegraph line to the room of two classmates and inti- 

 mate friends, Lefavour and Pine, in one of the College Halls. It is 

 said that his health was somewhat impaired for a time by his too severe 

 labor in preparation for the admission examinations, and it is not 

 improbable that he established the telegraphic communication with 

 his friends by way of diversion during this indisposition. Illness was 

 usually for him an opportunity to do something which he might not 

 have found time for in health. 



