1865.] 135 [Wood. 



his various excellences, and certainly without any purposed action of 

 his own, for with all his amiable qualities he was remarkably inde- 

 pendent, he conciliated almost universal good-will; and few men have 

 been more generally esteemed, and, where well known, better be- 

 loved than he. 



Dr. Bache's writings and public teaching were marked by his cha- 

 racteristic intellectual traits. Simplicity, clearness, truthfulness, ac- 

 curacy and method were their chief qualities, in regard both to ma- 

 terial and arrangement. Correct reasoning and sound judgment 

 were also evinced whenever there was occasion for their exercise. 

 His style was easy and remarkably correct, even to the punctua- 

 tion, and his language pure, idiomatic English. His publii^hed 

 writings are entirely exempt from any appearance of effort or at- 

 tempt at display. The purely ornamental is eschewed entirely. 

 Figures of speech, flights of fancy, and flowers of rhetoric, are un- 

 known to them. 



It may seem strange that one so addicted to science, and especially 

 to chemistry, as he, should not only not have made any remarkable 

 discovery, but should not even have exerted himself in the line of 

 experimental research; but to the discoverer, except in the fields of 

 pure natural history, where observation is the great requisite, a cer- 

 tain amount of the imaginative faculty, and of the disposition to its 

 exercise, which is apt to attend its possession, is, I believe, an essen- 

 tial requisite; and of this, as before mentioned, Dr. Bache had very 

 little. To find out the new, one must be able to penetrate some- 

 what into the unknown. The discoverer must have an imagination 

 that shall carry him beyond the present, and suggest new ideas and 

 new trains of thought; and, though these are not discoveries, yet 

 they become so when, having been submitted to the test of experi- 

 ment under the guidance of reason and judgment, they may either 

 be found to be themselves truths, or paths which lead to truth. A 

 combination of these powers, the imagination, reason, and judgment, 

 is essential to make a great discoverer or inventor; and of the three, 

 a certain degree of the first is indispensable, outside of the field of 

 pure observation, unless as the result of mere blind accident. 



From 1841 to the time of his decease, Dr. Bache's course of life 

 was, so far as I know, distinguished by no prominent incident beyond 

 those connected with his regular engagements, except a journey in 

 Europe, made with myself in the spring and summer of 1858. It 

 was my original intention, in preparing this memoir, to incorporate 

 with it a brief abstract of that journey, which was certainly con- 



