44 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



Five hundred and fifty-eighth Meeting. 



November 14, 1865. — Monthly Meeting. 



The President in the chair. 



The President called the attention of the Academy to the 

 recent decease of the eminent lexicographer Dr. Joseph E. 

 Worcester, of the Resident Fellows. 



Professor Lovering, from the Rumford Committee, delivered 

 to the President the Rumford Medal, which had been prepared 

 in accordance with a vote of the Academy to be presented to 

 Professor Tread well. 



The President prefaced the presentation of this medal with 

 the following remarks : — 



At the Anniversary Meeting last May, upon the unanimous recom- 

 mendation of our Rumford Committee, the medal founded by Count 

 Rumford was by the Academy awarded to Professor Daniel Tread- 

 well for certain improvements in the management of heat. This medal 

 is now before us. It is the first which the Academy has ever bestowed 

 upon one of its immediate members. 



As your organ upon this occasion, before we place this testimonial 

 in the hands of our distinguished associate, it is proper that I should 

 briefly specify the grounds upon which your Committee proposed, and 

 you made, this award. It is well understood, and the terms of the vote 

 distinctly show, that this medal was awarded for an invention or an 

 improvement in the management of heat. It is also well known that 

 this particular improvement is a part — the initial part, indeed — 

 of a series of inventions, — applicable to other uses, no doubt, — but 

 through which the character of ordnance has been changed, and its 

 power immensely increased. This was the end and aim of the im- 

 provement for which the medal is given. 



We may, therefore, and we must upon this occasion, speak of this 

 particular improvement in the management of heat in connection with 

 the mechanical inventions which accompanied and followed it, and to 

 which indeed the former is incidental. For the whole important series 

 of mechanical inventions which I am to recapitulate, the Academy 

 must regret that it has no honors which it can bestow. But their his- 

 tory is upon our records, embodied in the communications addressed to 



