ELISHA MITCHELL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY. 2$ 



of his numerous and valuable correspondents in this and other 

 countries. 



This was truly then a life which humanity may contemplate with 

 a calm delight; these were labors which science may review with a 

 noble satisfaction. 



With a laudable emulation of all the excellences which had, be- 

 fore his own day, given lustre to his name, and a clear perception of 

 the truth that the virtue of ancestors sheds no lioiior on any but 

 the virtuous of their offspring; with a zeal for the acquisition of 

 knowledge, which, springing from an innate law of his being, af- 

 forded to his undertaking that pure gratification which, by another 

 law of his bsing, knowledge alone could impart; with a benevolent 

 desire to communicate whatever of delight the investigations of 

 science and literature had infused into his own heart; with a love 

 for the beauties of nature exhibited almost in infancy and which 

 grew with the increase of every faculty and lasted to the closing pe- 

 riod of his too short career; with a purity of mind and heart which 

 made every truth of nature a lesson in virtue; with an intrepidity 

 in the prosecution of scientific enterprizes which led him out of 

 beaten tracks and taught him to find pleasure in threading those 

 very labyrinths from which most other travellers in the paths of 

 knowledge shrink in despair; with a clearness of method which en- 

 able him to communicate to others the full advantage of his own 

 discoveries in these mazy haunts of nature; with a candor and fair- 

 ness which never merged the man of honor in an effort unduly to 

 elevate the man of science; never sought by questionable artifices 

 to obscure or to hide the just reputation of others; with a benevo- 

 lence of disposition which marked him to find everywhere in works 

 of creation the traces of that beneficence which, in his professional 

 character, it was his highest pleasure to portray and his most ardent 

 desire to imitate ; with a cheerfulness of disposition and a suavity 

 of manners which rendered him an object of deep affection in every 

 social relation ; with a rectitude of purpose which won the confi- 

 dence, while it formed the character of youth — and secured the 

 gratitude, while it watched over the interests of age ; with an assi- 

 duity which encountered the fatigues of many voyages, not always 

 without peril, in the service of that cause to which he was devoted; 

 with a patient continuance in years of toilsome effort to extend, by 

 precept and example, the benign system of practical goodness and 

 spiritual liberality which ever shone in his life and actions; with a 

 distinct perception that the treasures accumulated in a life devoted 

 to science are not for individual possession, but, in order to produce 



