28 



Report on the Utility of a uniform System in Measures, Weights, 

 Fineness and Decimal Accounts, for the Standard Coinage of 

 Commercial Nations. By J. H. Gibbon, M.D. of the U. S. 

 Branch Mint, North Carolina. Charleston, 1854. 8vo. — From 

 the AutJior. 



The Duty of Columbia College to the Community, and its right to 

 exclude Unitarians from its Professorships of Physical Science, 

 considered by one of its Trustees. New York, 1854. 8vo. — 

 — Donor unknown. 



The Plough, the Loom and the Anvil. Vol. VI. No. 10. April, 1854. 

 New York. 8vo. — From the Editors. 



Judge Kane, pursuant to appointment, read an obituary no- 

 lice of the late William Strickland, a member of the Society. 



William Strickland. It is at best a melancholy office, that 

 which I have undertaken, to trace the obituary memorial of an old 

 and intimate friend. It calls back passages in my own life, that 

 might willingly if not wisely be forgotten, hopes and apprehensions 

 that we shared or sympathised in together, hopes, some of them re- 

 alized happily in later years ; some of them, hopes as well as appre- 

 hensions, realized to our sorrow. It brings round me the genial 

 names we both used to delight in, Biddle, and Chapman, and Dewees, 

 and Hopkinson, and I had almost added Patterson; of the whole 

 group I am the only survivor. It is fitting that I should indite the 

 farewell notice of Strickland ; he would have done as much for me. 



My association with him dates back to the year 1619. It began 

 the very day he laid the foundation stone of the Bank of the United 

 States ; he came up from the work to welcome me after my mar- 

 riage. 



Before that time his life had been one of checkered fortunes. His 

 father was a carpenter, a skilful artisan, for Latrobe the great archi- 

 tect of his day confided to him the execution of many of his plans, 

 an honest man withal, for he never speculated, and yet died poor. 

 His son William, a boy in the draughting room, attracted Latrobe's 

 favour by the quickness of his eye and the facility of his pencil, as 

 as well as by his joyous and grateful temperament. Latrobe took 

 the charge of his education as an engineer and architect; disciplining 

 his taste to the severe harmonics of Grecian art, that exquisite art, 

 which he himself commemorated so perfectly in the Minerva Polias 

 outline of the Bank of Pennsylvania, and his pupil afterwards in the 

 portico of the Parthenon. 



