528 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



ful country. To it he brought the same patient investigation and 

 broad generalization which marked his work elsewhere, and his treat- 

 ment of it before his audience was generous, persuasive, and attractive. 

 One word I may be permitted in regard to his personal qualities. 

 Professor Cooke was eminently simple, truthful, and earnest, kindly 

 and affectionate. Possibly my connection with the Institute, which 

 had done so much to determine his career and before which he had so 

 often appeared, may have influenced his feeling, but to me he was 

 always a kind friend, for whose attainments I had the highest respect, 

 and whose pure, honest, confiding nature was always attractive and 

 inspiring. 



ADDRESS OF FRANCIS HUMPHREYS STORER. 



I HAVE heard Professor Cooke say jokingly, but with a tinge of 

 honest pride, that he was a '• self-made chemist." The remark was 

 true in one sense, for beside listening as a boy to a few popular lec- 

 tures by the elder Silliman, and following for a brief period some of 

 the public lectures of Dumas and other Parisians, he never had any 

 definite, stated instruction in Chemistry. To the best of my knowl- 

 edge and belief, he never worked for an hour in any other laboratory 

 than his own. Many of the most familiar details of analytical manip- 

 ulation he learned from his assistants while teaching them and his 

 classes what Chemistry really is. It was from books and from his 

 own inner consciousness that chemical knowledge came to him. Yet, 

 thanks to native ability, to an excellent academic training, to inherited 

 wealth, a clear head and a tenacious will, he came at last to stand in 

 the fore-front of American chemists, and to command the attention of 

 the fraternity in every land. Even as a manipulator, he became 

 expert; in spite of a constitutional tremulousness, which, in his youth 

 at least, had placed him at a great disadvantage. Like tlie surgeon 

 with his knife, in the story, he had so mastered his trembling hand, 

 that the thing held in it should shake assuredly into the right 

 place. 



But, although it is fair enough to say that as a chemist Cooke was 

 self-taught, no such statement would be true of him as a scholar. 

 There can, I think, be no question that a great part of the strength 

 of the man depended upon a scholarship distinctly superior to that of 

 most contemporaneous chemists. In point of fact, Professor Cooke 

 was very carefully trained at College, where he came under the 

 influence of many eminent men. Thanks to the teachings of Benja- 



