ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF HENRY CHARLES LEA. 

 By EDWARD POTTS CHEYXEY. 



It has been so short a time since Mr. Lea was moving among us — 

 to so many of those who are here he is still almost a living pres- 

 ence — that it is well-nigh impossible to view his long life and to esti- 

 mate his great work as a thing detached from us, completed, a part of 

 the past. Especially may one who through his whole mature life has 

 looked upon ^Nlr. Lea with admiration as a scholar, with gratitude as 

 a kindly adviser, critic and friend, and with constantly increasing 

 appreciation as one of the world's • great men, acknowledge the 

 inadequacy of this sketch of his life and list of his achievements. 

 Indeed in this city, in which ]\Ir. Lea's whole life was passed, and in 

 this company to whom his personality and much of his work were 

 familiar, I shall frequently rather be bringing his career to remem- 

 brance than giving information concerning it. 



Henry Charles Lea was born in Eighth Street above Spruce, 

 Philadelphia, in the year 1825. His boyhood has left a few sugges- 

 tive reminiscences. He remembered learning the letters of the Greek 

 alphabet as a child of six at the bedside of a mother well-educated 

 and strong in mind, however frail in body — the daughter of INIathew 

 Carey, the sister of Henry C. Carey. The intellectual atmosphere 

 into which he was born and in which he grew up is indicated also 

 by the studies in natural history of his father, Isaac Lea, and by his 

 own training under a private tutor. From this tutor, whose name 

 was Eugenius Nulty, a scholar of an old and rigorous type, and a 

 man of much individuality and force, he received an unusually thor- 

 ough and effective drill in the ancient languages and other funda- 

 mentals. A short stay in 1832 at a school in Paris, where he was 

 the only boy not a native of France, probably had something to do 

 with his easy use of Erench, both as a spoken and a written language, 

 during his later life. He remembered the French boys bringing to 

 school bullets found in the streets after the Parisian rising that led 



