EBEN NORTON HORSFORD. 341 



Mrs. Wilson was a remarkable woman, and did much toward building 

 up his character on the broad foundations laid by his mother. 



From the Livingston County School he went to tlie Rensselaer 

 Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, from which he graduated as 

 a civil engineer in 1837. While studying at the Rensselaer Institute 

 he spent his vacations in earning money toward his support, at first 

 by teaching at Leroy, and later by work on the surveys for the New 

 York and Erie, and the Rochester and Auburn Railroads. 



After his graduation he obtained for a time congenial employment 

 on the Geological Survey of the State of New York, under Professor 

 James Hall, and in 1840 was appointed Professor of Mathematics and 

 Natural Sciences in the Albany Female Academy, a position which 

 he held for four years. During this time he took up the study 

 of Daguerre's photographic process with Morse, the inventor of the 

 telegraph, and this work attracted the attention of the scientific world 

 to him, and led to his delivering a course of lectures on chemistry at 

 Newark College in Delaware in 1843, and another in 1844, after he 

 had left the Albany Academy. This period at Albany was of great 

 importance in the formation of his character ; Hall and Morse fostered 

 his taste for scientific research and impressed upon him careful and 

 accurate methods of work ; the Reverend Dr. William Sprague had 

 a strong influence on his general development ; and at the Female 

 Academy he met Mary L'Hommedieu Gardiner, who afterward (in 

 1847) became his wife. 



So far as his future was concerned, the most important result of 

 his growing reputation was an invitation from Professor Webster to 

 visit him in Cambridge, when he urged Horsford to go abroad and 

 study, — advice which was followed in December, 1844. Arrived in 

 Germany he turned his steps toward Giessen, at that time the goal 

 of all chemical students, where Liebig had recently introduced the 

 modern method of teaching chemistry in the laboratory. Here he 

 spent two happy profitable years in the society of such men as Hof- 

 mann (whose desk was next his), Williamson, Fresenius, Will, and 

 many others who afterward became famous in the science, — a chemi- 

 cal family over which Liebig exercised a fatherly care. At the end 

 of this time Liebig, with whom he was a great favorite, urged him to 

 take the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. This he refused to do, 

 because he was living on borrowed money, and thought it not right 

 to involve himself further in debt, even by the slight amount of the 

 fee for the degree. Liebig induced the University to offer to remit 

 the fee, a great honor when the tenacity with which Universities 



