PEESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 31 



These and other pleasantries, of which many are quoted in 

 Fairchild's admirable •' History of the New York Academy of 

 Sciences," gives us an idea of the provinciality of New York 

 sixty years ago, when every citizen would seem to have known 

 the principal local representatives of science, and to have felt a 

 sense of personal proprietorship in him and in his projects. 



Mitchill was a leader in the New York Historical Society ; 

 founder of the Literary and Philosophical Society, and of its 

 successor, the Lyceum of Natural History, of which he was long 

 president. He was also President of the New York Branch of 

 the Linnaean Society of Paris, and of the N. Y. State Medical 

 Society, and Surgeon-General of the State Militia ; a man of the 

 widest influence and universally beloved. He served four terms 

 in the House of Representatives, and was five years a member 

 of the U. S. Senate.* 



DeWitt Clinton [b. 1769, d. 182S], statesman and philan- 

 thropist, U. S. Senator, and Governor of New York, was a 

 man of similar tastes and capacities. What Benjamin Frank- 

 lin was to Philadelphia in the middle of the eighteenth century 

 DeWitt Clinton was to New York in the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth. He was the author of the Hibernicus '' Letters on 

 the Natural History and Internal Resources of the State of New 

 York" (New York, 1823), a work of originality and merit. As 

 President of the Literary and Philosophical Society he delivered 

 in 1814 an '• Introductory Discourse," which, like Barton's in 



* See Fraxcis, John W. Life of Dr. Mitchill, in Williams's American 

 Medical Biography, pp. 401-41 1, and eulogy in Discourse in Commemora- 

 tion of 53d Anniversary of N. Y. Hist. Soc, 1857, 56-60; and in his Old 

 New York; also — 



Sketch by H. L. Fairchild in History of the New York Academy of Sci- 

 ences, 1887, pp. 57-67; also Dr. Mitchill's own pamphlet: Some of the 

 Memorable Events and Occurrences in the Life of Samuel S. Mitchill, of 

 New York, from the year 1786 to 1827. 



A biography by Akerly was in existence, but has never been printed. 



Numerous portraits are in existence, which are described by Fairchild. 



