xviii Centennial Anniversary 



New Haven was but a small capital. Yale was but a small 

 college. But there were then few larger cities, and only one 

 larger college on the American continent. 



The membership of the Academy was co-extensive with the 

 State, and embraced men of all parties and all shades of opinion. 

 Among those named in the charter were Chief Justice Swift of 

 Windham, whose treatises on legal topics were among the earliest 

 as they are among the best of American works of that character ; 

 Josiah Meigs, an ardent Jefferson ian, then holding the chair of 

 Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Yale, but soon to find a 

 more congenial political atmosphere in Georgia, where he went in 

 1801 to become President of its State University ; Noah Webster; 

 Abraham Bishop, whose attacks on President Dwight in political 

 addresses soon put an impassable gulf between them; Chief Justice 

 Hosmer of Middletown ; Judge Pierpont Edwards ; Chief Justice 

 Ellsworth of Windsor; and Dr. Bela Hubbard, rector of Trinity 

 Church, and the leader of the Episcopalian clergy of the diocese. 



President Dwight was particularly interested in political 

 science. He was also a close student of history, and saw the 

 importance for the United States of reducing to proper form for 

 future use all the historical and statistical material that, so famil- 

 iar as to be uninteresting to one generation, is of priceless value 

 to the next. 



Under his lead, in December, 1799, action was taken towards 

 memorializing Congress to enlarge the objects of the national 

 census. of 1800, and to secure greater particularity in the returns. 

 Cooperation in this effort was invited from the American Philo- 

 sophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 



The Academy also, a week later, agreed on a circular letter to 

 be issued in its name, asking for statistical information as to the 

 State of Connecticut and the several towns within its jurisdiction. 

 The result of this request, which was followed up by newspaper 

 addresses, and much private correspondence, was that such statis- 

 tics were obtained from more than thirty towns ;* by far the most 

 valuable being those for New Haven prepared by President 

 Dwight. This piece of his work was published by the Academy 

 in 1811, in a pamphlet of 84 pages, as the first part of the first 



* The Yale Book, I, 333. 



