SKETCH OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



553 



personally advocated it before the corj^oration at their session in July, 

 1846. This memoir contemplated the official recognition and organi- 

 zation of the new department of advanced science-teaching which had, 

 unbidden by and almost unknown to them, sprung into existence. The 

 result was the appointment of a committee and the widening of the 

 plan to embrace advanced instruction in other subjects, at the sugges- 

 tion of Mr. Woolsey. This committee reported in 1847 the plan of a 

 " Fourth Department," devoted to philosophy and the arts, the first 

 appointments to which had already been made in 1846 — Mr. John P. 

 Norton to agricultural chemistry and Mr. Silliman to chemistry applied 

 to the arts. The " Yale Scientific School " as then organized commenced 

 its operations in 1847, opening its laboratories in the old Presidential 

 Mansion (formerly the dwelling of Dr. Day and Dr. Dwight). 



It is proper to record the fact — as showing under what difficul- 

 ties and discouragements these early efforts were made — that be- 

 yond an income of three hundred dollars per annum paid for a few 

 years by a liberal friend of the college, at the solicitation of Pro- 

 fessor Silliman, the new department was absolutely penniless, and 

 the entire cost of fitting and furnishing the laboratoi'ies, apparatus, 

 libraries, and cabinets, was paid out of the private means of the two 

 professors ; who also for two years (to the shame of the corporation 

 be it said) paid into the college treasury a rental for the use of the 

 old house they had also paid for adapting and fitting for these pur- 

 poses ! Little encouraging as were these small beginnings, there 

 were not wanting the zeal and enthusiasm which were better than 

 gold, and which were reproduced in the early pupils. From its very 

 commencement this new undertaking bore good fruit. Pupils came 

 up in goodly numbers, and the first classes embraced names now 

 widely known on both sides of the Atlantic. Of these, three — 

 Brewer, Brush, and Johnson— are now professors in the Sheffield 

 Scientific School. Out of the effort which he then commenced single- 

 handed, and to which he devoted some of the best years of his life 

 — always paying his own salary — has grown up a new college, em- 

 bracing more professors than the old academic college had when he 

 graduated in 1837, with two hundred students, and with constantly 

 increasing power and endowments. 



