vi OBITUARY NOTICES OF MEMBERS DECEASED. 



to the dethronement of Charles X. It was a long memory that 

 covered the history of France from the Bourbons to the thirty- 

 eighth anniversary of the Third Republic. 



A more characteristic reminiscence was that of his desire, as a 

 boy of twelve or fourteen, for a copy of x^nacreon in the Greek, 

 which was unobtainable because of the necessity, in the shadow of 

 the crisis of 1837, of so rigid an economy as to forbid the expendi- 

 ture of fifteen cents for the cheapest copy procurable. In a series of 

 visits to the Philadelphia Library he copied the whole of Anacreon, 

 and thus possessed himself of the first of his collection of manu- 

 scripts — none the less accurate probably because it was made in the 

 nineteenth and not in the ninth century. The publication in Silli- 

 mail's Journal when he was a boy of thirteen of a paper on 

 " Manganese and its Salts," the result of a period of study in a 

 chemical laboratory, may serve as a reminder that his earliest training 

 was as much in scientific as in classical lines ; and also that his mind 

 was of that type that must produce as well as ac(|uire. 



By 1843 boyhood was over. At the age of eighteen, a new period 

 opened with his entrance into his father's publishing house, and thus 

 commenced a business career which was to last for thirty-seven 

 years, till his retirement in 1880. As a youth, during the next four 

 years, he worked hard at business in the daytime and equally hard 

 at his studies late at night and early in the morning. Few persons, 

 I think, can look over the files of the magazines of the years from 

 1843 to 1846 and realize without astonishment that the sixteen or 

 more long articles signed by Henry C. Lea were the work of a young 

 business man of eighteen to twenty-one, regularly occupied during 

 the long working hoiu-s of that period. He was fulfilling two 

 apprenticeships at the same time, one to the publishing business, the 

 other to literature. 



It is curious to see the conflict of interests in the latter of these 

 fields between science and the humanities. In May, 1843, ^^^ 

 iniblished in the Transactions of flic American Philosophical Society 

 a paper on " Some New Shells from Petersburg, \'a.," and in August 

 of the same year in The Knickerbocker of New York an article on 

 " Greek Fpitaphs and Inscriptions." In September, i8z^4, in a 

 southern journal is to be found a critical article by him on Leigh 



