GEORGE ENGELMANN. 



Although our Academy has met with many serious losses dur- 

 ing its existence of nearly thirty years, it never sustained one so 

 serious and so lamentable as that which occurred on February 

 4th, i884, when George Engelmann, one of its founders, its mcst 

 useful and highly respected member, its first and repeatedly re- 

 elected President, breathed his last. His life was exceedingly 

 active, it was spent in the service of science and kindred work, 

 and it can be upheld fitly to the rising generation as an illustri- 

 ous example. 



George Engelmann was born in Germany on February 2nd, 

 1809, in the old and wealthy city of Frankfort-on-the-Main. 

 Members of his family had for generations been ministers of the 

 Gospel at Bacharach and other places along the Rhine, except his 

 father, who, although also destined for the ministry, preferred, 

 after his graduation at the University of Halle, the schoolroom to 

 the pulpit, and introduced a novelty into tiie educational system 

 of his time by establishing, and successfully conducting, a school 

 for the education and training of young ladies. He was nobly 

 supported in his laudable enterprise by his wife, the daughter of 

 a distinguished portrait painter, G. O. May, whose family had 

 descended from the old stock of prominent Huguenots driven 

 from France under the reign of Louis XIV. and kindly received 

 in all parts of Protestant Germany. 



George was the eldest of thirteen children that sprang from 

 this union, and received from his highly intellectual parents an 

 excellent education, the eflect of which was greatly enhanced by 

 the connection of his father with the most prominent persons of the 

 city, whose scientific attainments and enlightened conversation 



