850 BENJAMIN OSGOOD PEIRCE. 



for below the judgment of his peers there was no other guide but 

 conscience." "Precisely to such bodies of inexorable critics did the 

 intrinsic strength of the work of Professor Packard ultimately appeal."^ 

 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him to member- 

 ship in 1868; the Societe Royale des Sciences de Liege, 1875; the 

 Society of Friends of Natural Science in Moscow, in 1891. In 1891 

 he was elected foreign member of the Linnean Society of London. He 

 was elected also to membership in the entomological societies of 

 London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Stockholm and Brussels; was made 

 one of the honorary presidents of the International Zoological Congress 

 in Paris, 1899; honorary president of the Zoological Section of the 

 French Association for the Advancement of Sciences; vice-president 

 (1899) of the corresponding Section of the American Association. 



A. D. Mead. 



BENJAMIN OSGOOD PEIRCE (1854-1914) 



Fellow in Class I, Section 2, 1884. 



The following biographical notice of Professor Benjamin Osgood 

 Peirce is taken for the most part from the Minute on his life and 

 services which was placed on the records of the Harvard Faculty of 

 Arts and Sciences at the meeting of February 17, 1914. A much 

 more extended biography will be published by the National Academy 

 of Sciences. 



Our colleague, Benjamin Osgood Peirce, who died in Cambridge on 

 the fourteenth of January, 1914, was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, 

 February 11, 1854, of a family belonging for several generations to the 

 city of Salem. Of his ancestors, Richard Norman came to Gloucester 

 in 1623, John Peirce to Watertown in 1637, John and Christopher 

 Osgood to other parts of eastern Massachusetts before 1640. John 

 Peirce had a son Robert, but after the Cromwellian era names taken 

 from the Old Testament prevail in the family, and it is hard to refrain 

 from using the robust terms of the Old Testament genealogies in recit- 



2 Carl Barus, Memorial Address. 



